PNG for web graphics

[roxics]

PNG's are new to me. For some reason. Jpegs and gifs seemed to have been around forever but it seems like PNG's just came out of nowhere. At least to me.

I've started playing with the format in photoshop and it gives me the best results for transparency on the web. For some reasons gif's always seem to have a really bad edge to them. PNG's don't seem to have this problem.

But is there any drawback to using a PNG graphic as the main way to display special fonts and graphics on a website (you know banners and stuff)? Will some people not be able to view them because of compatibility issues or anything like that? Or will I be perfectly fine using them for everything?

Thanks

[jackwanders]

First and foremost, PNG transparency doesn't work in IE. So what you see as nice alpha-blended transparency in Firefox or Opera will show up as a grey background in IE. IE 7 will fix this, but for the time being, that's the way it works.

PNGs use a lossless compression, so in general, you get better results than using JPG, as JPG compression creates artifacts. If the image doesn't have many colors, go with GIF as the resulting file size will likely be smaller. If the image is not large, PNG is good, but if the image is large, try to go with JPG as the compression will save you on file size.

[Ramble]

Yes. PNg's with transparency will not work in Internet Explorer.

Also, they are new, so dont work in some old browers.

[Menge]

IE doesn't display transparent PNGs correctly. It enforces a BG color on them.

asides from file size usually being larger than JPEG (cause it's lossless compression), none other :)

[Jellman]

PNG's Rock the house :D