Re: Admonition icons with alpha

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 06:57:52AM +1100 or thereabouts, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Hey gang,
> 
> I created some new admonition icons for the website docbook bits; I just
> needed alpha ones, so I took the opportunity to make them slightly cleaner,
> with a .xcf (GIMP) file for editing at a later date. Same designs.
> 
> They're very small, and come with GIFs <http://www.burnallgifs.org/>, for
> those of us unfortunate enough to have browsers with shite PNG support. The
> website will automagically choose the appropriate one.
> 
> The "i" and "!" were done with 'Georgia', one of the MS web fonts, but the
> pixels are clean. :-)
> 
>   http://www.gnome.org/random/admonitions.tar.gz
> 
> Might be good to swap yelp's ones with these, for consistency.

It's actually not covered very much in the archives. But for 
some years (woo, It's Tradition!) now, the GDP has eschewed
GIFs in favour of PNGs in the documentation we write. 

GNOME and KDE made a joint request for enhancement to DocBook
itself over this, It was DocBook RFE 105 dating from 1999, and
was incorporated into DocBook 4.0. 

The fact that the "previous", "index", "next" images produced
by (open)jade (I think?) were in GIFs is something we prefer 
to forget :) All our images and screenshots were in PNG format.

Yes, this is a pig for older browsers. I can see the rationale
for having a fallback of GIFs if the browser can't do PNGs. 
I'm not sure I agree with it! But I can see it.

I do think it would be most unfortunate if we were to push
GIF support into yelp, however. We went to all the trouble of
having a custom DTD to support these weirdo PNG things when
the rest of the world was using GIFs. To start using GIFs now
seems to me to be a mistake. The rest of the world is catching 
up with us, after all. 

Just turning the things into PNGs would make me be quiet :) 

Telsa