Background color fade/gradiation

Question

Hi all. I am trying to make a basic html page in Dreamweaver
with a purple background color that is darkest at the top, then
fades gradually as you look down the page. Any advice? Thanks in
advance!

Answer 1

.oO(Gary White)
>On Sat, 14 Mar 2009 23:23:39 +0100, Michael Fesser
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>It's more or less a known issue. Some browsers (like
IE) have problems
>>with correctly rendering the colors of some image
formats. Some Safari
>>browsers also had this problem IIRC. In theory an
#RGB color value from
>>a PNG should look exactly the same as the same value
taken from a CSS,
>>but some browsers just don't get it right.
>
>Clearly. Here is a comparison of Firefox, IE, Opera and
Safari/Win:
>
http://apptools.com/test/comparison.html
>
>The interesting thing is that FF displays all three
images very much the
>same, but darker than Opera or Safari. IE displays only
the PHG darker
>than the other two. Opera displays the PNG only very
slightly darker, but
>as a significantly smoother gradient.
Nice test.
>>Anyway, this is the look of your three gradients in
Opera:
>>
>>
http://ra-pauli.de/temp/gradients1.png
>>
>>And here the same with a highly increased contrast:
>>
>>
http://ra-pauli.de/temp/gradients2.png
>
>While your comparisons are valid, they aren't really
fair. You can pick up
>flaws in almost any image if you enlarge and play with
HSV values enough.
It wasn't my intention to do an unfair comparison. I justed
wanted to
show the subtle differences, which _might_ become visible in
some cases.
I've already seen things like mysterious horizontal stripes
in an
otherwise smooth gradient, simply caused by JPEG compression
artefacts
and slightly mis-colored pixels. Tiled horizontally such
wrong pixels
might become a visible line. The second image was just meant
to better
show where such glitches may come from.
>What I aim for is to create images that look right when
displayed in the
>page normally. That's where you make trade-offs between
compression and
>quality. You aim for the greatest compression that yields
acceptable
>quality as the image will be displayed.
I usually also aim for best display. And thankfully in this
case the PNG
not only has best display, but also best compression. ;-)
The difference in your FF compared to the other browsers
could be a
configuration issue (color management maybe), because in my
FF 3 the
result is almost identical to the one in Opera. The thing in
IE is
clearly a bug, but IE 6 also has such problems in some cases.
The only question is if such a difference is acceptable or
not. Usually
I can live with that, but it also depends on the page and its
content.
Micha