[1] // Aug 8, 2008

How to Fix PNG Problems on IE6 with No Technical Knowledge

The core of this post is designed for WordPress users–but there are just a couple more steps needed for everyone else.

You’ve heard me mention it before–the pain and suffering that goes into working with Internet Explorer 6. It just doesn’t follow the rules.

While layout problems are a major pain, one of my pet peeves is the lack of transparent PNG support in IE6. That’s what we’re here to talk about today–how to fix these problems in just a few seconds without having to do any code editing yourself.

For months (years), there have been quite a few different solutions out there on how to fix these PNG problems. Most of them revolve around inserting some JavaScript into your site’s head and changing the names of all of your PNG files. Unfortunately, a lot of these workarounds have been limited, unable to deal with outside the box PNGs, such as those which have been tiled or used as backgrounds, or so on and so forth.

With all of these setbacks, one solution has seemed to work the best–the Unit PNG Fix. It’s small, simple, and does the job really well. Certainly better than most. I’m using it on some of my other sites, but not this one–yet.

The only real problem remaining is that you actually have to edit your site’s code to ascertain the benefits of the PNG fix.

But those days are gone.

Thanks to the work of Vincenzo Russo, we now have a plugin (aptly named the WP-UnitPNGfix) that can do exactly what the Unit PNG Fix is capable of doing, without having to edit any code. It’s only for WordPress, but that’s better than nothing.

So, if you’re having trouble making that step to edit your own code, try installing this plugin instead. You’ll thank yourself later.

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1 comment
  1. Thank you for mentioning! Anyway I wish to remark all that the JS included is unable to work with tiled background transparent PNGs. It only works with non-tiled backgrounds and ‘img’ HTML tag. I will investigate if there is a solution for tiled background too.

    Bye!

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