I have a question about the icons and avatars I use here on WolfSpoor. Since it affects everyone here, I thought I'd post it here rather than in the forums or on wolfspoor_news.

I'm torn on changing over from the current GIF format to PNG. Read more for the reasons why I want to, and why I haven't yet. Since this is the second time I'm writing this (I have no idea what happened the first time, but I lost the post), I'll try to keep it simple.

GIFs and PNGs are very similar. The big difference I'm concerned with is transparency.

GIF supports transparency, in a binary fashion. Something is either fully transparent, or it's fully opaque.

The icons as they are now consist of three layers: a fully opaque foreground (say, the red Vampire skull), a 30% opaque midground (the WoD logo), and an opque white background. The background, I do because otherwise the midground won't show up, being less than 50% transparent. Icons would look like crap. Unfortunately, it means that they only really look good on a page with a white background. Otherwise (fr'ex, the grey portions of the forums) you can easily see the icon's white background.

Now, PNG supports partial transparency (see here for an example). This means I could do away with an icon's white background. The foreground would remain opaque, and the midground could remain 30% opaque. You'd be able to see it on any page background, no matter what the colour or texture.

Now this means it'd look better in our forums. But it also means I'd be able to introduce a lot of different themes for the site, and the icons would continue to look good.

If that were all there were to it, I would have done it already. But, unfortunately, 45% of our users use Internet Explorer, which doesn't currently support PNG's transparency. Here's what the same page would look like on IE6 and on (fr'ex) Opera 7. Maybe the upcoming Windows Longhorn's version of IE will support PNG, maybe not. That's several years away, at least.

So what should I do? Change everything over, and IE users will have to suffer? Or keep the GIFs, and I'll just have to deal with the fact that icons look less-than-perfect on non-white backgrounds?

Please vote in the poll on the right-hand side. Thanks, everyone.