PNG Transparency: Linux Arena beta-3b Screenshots

PNG Transparency

Screenshots from Arena beta-3b for Linux

These are half-scale JPEG screenshots of the pngs-img.html, png-IceAlpha.html, and png-MagnoliaAlpha.html pages, as well as two external pages by Chris Lilley and Glenn Randers-Pehrson. They were taken by Greg using a Linux/libc5 binary of Arena beta 3b (a.k.a. "version 0.3.02") dating from 1996 or so; later versions were improved in many ways, but Greg never managed to get another working build.

Click on the half-scale images to see the full-scale, 24-bit PNG images (496997, 217294, 422155 and 104585 bytes, respectively, for the first set).

pngs-img.html

png-IceAlpha.html

png-MagnoliaAlpha.html

inline-alpha-table.html

Arena's rendering of PNG transparency is essentially perfect, but version 3b predated a number of HTML 3.2 features (especially related to tables and alignment, as in the shot of Chris Lilley's inline-alpha-table page above), and it simply didn't support others that were already in common use at the time. The most obvious of these is the BGCOLOR attribute of the BODY tag; in the absence of a background image, Arena always uses its own ``sandy'' background rather than the specified color (which is a pale green in the case of the first screenshot). Even with a background image, as in the second and third screenshots above, transparent images are rendered against Arena's default background, which leads to some ugly effects.

gamma_test

But on the plus side, Arena 3b already supported gamma correction, as the shot of Glenn Randers-Pehrson's gamma-test page shows. Its linked PNG image is 73711 bytes.

Here are some related PNG pages at this site:

Last modified 14 March 2009.