Re: proposal: background-image-alpha

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Emrah BASKAYA" <emrahbaskaya@hesido.com>
To: "Andrew Fedoniouk" <news@terrainformatica.com>; "www-style.w3.org" 
<www-style@w3.org>


|
| On Mon, 08 May 2006 09:09:52 +0300, Andrew Fedoniouk
| <news@terrainformatica.com> wrote:
|
| >
| > Hi, Emrah,
|
| Thanks for taking your time to criticise.

I am not critisizing strictly speaking.
I am just trying to better understand idea / motivations.

|
| >
| > First of all PNG supports 16 bit per channel, so there is also PNG64
| > Also it supports for example 16 bit grayscale + 16 bit alpha-channel
| > configuration
| **snip
| > Lets limit ourselves for the second by JPEG, GIF and PNG only.
| > The only useful combination here: PNG on background and PNG as alpha.
| > Reasons: 1) GIF does not support grayscale (needed to serve alpha mask
| > purpose)
| > 2) JPEG is not suitable for alpha mask purpose because of its lossy
| > encoding -
| > being combined with another image will create artifacts.
| >
| > So the only option is PNG/PNG. Why not use single PNG16/32/64 then?
|
| I don't believe the only option would be PNG/PNG. PNG is suitable for
| certain types of images (straight gradients, typography, logos), while JPG
| is for others, (photographs, images with natural transitions), so a
| JPG/PNG,
| a JPG/GIF combo could only benefit designers. A simple example that does
| not do justice to the proposal would be a photo fading into background
| color with a simple PNG gradient.

I see your point here. But fading is just one case.

This effect (well, not exactly) could be achieved by:
<img src="photo.jpg" style="background-image:url(photo.jpg); 
foreground-image:url(frame.png)" />

Again this is not exactly as you want but close.

Another approach: to use server side image processing or to use <img 
src="framed-photo.svg" /> if it
would be possible.

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com


|
| >
| >> *Using different bit depths for image and alpha (e.g. 5bit foreground
| >> image, 3bit alpha)
| >
| > 3bit alpha is rather theoretical than practical I think.
| >
| > GIF has 1bit alpha and PNG supports 8/16bit alpha - for practical cases
| > this is enough I believe.
|
| You are to some extent right, 8bit would do the job of any lesser bit
| depths, but just as we could, on some images, "get away" with 3 bit colors
| due to the nature of a particular image, we could also get away with 3
| bits of transparency, which should seem a lot better than 1 bit
| transparency, and save bandwidth and memory compared to 8 bit transparency.
|
| >> *Alpha on a color background instead of an image, hence the ability use
| >> different colors with same alpha.
| >
| > grayscale PNG image with alpha channel can serve this purpose pretty
| > well I think.
|
| I believe this may cause gray shifting, unless the UI chooses to apply the
| transparency with compensation, which is not practical to define without a
| separate property or value. Anyway this was just a bonus functionality.
|
| **snip
| >
| > Another idea: to introduce foreground-* attributes similar to
| > background-* attributes. So element could have two images
| > if needed. This will also solve your case but will give significantly
| > more.
| > foreground-* will be drawn on the same layer as 'outline' currently.
|
| I don't think it does what my proposal suggests, but it is a good idea in
| its own right.
|
| Also, if we enhance the proposal with seperate positioning/repeat such as:
| background-image-alpha: <alpha-image> || <image-alpha-type> || <opacity>
||| <position> || <repeat>
| we'd have the ability to use e.g. a 32x32 image as alpha for a 800x800 jpg
| image, coming up with
|
| **pasting from other mail replying to David Woolley's comment
| > Yes, but it is still RGB value in GIF. So to be able to use it as single
| > alpha
| > channel
| > value you need also to define how this single value produced from
| > *arbitrary*
| > RGB GIF.
| > This RGB to grayscale translation is a subject of holy wars on the Net,
| > like is
| > it
| > luminance or what...
|
| Whatever the method, RGB to grayscale conversion would create a much less
| havoc than PNG's gamma feature (Which should have never been brought up
| and used in the first place, as it is a constant nuisance when used
| together with other image formats and even simple color declarations).
| But I am indeed glad we have other options.
|
| Yours,
| Emrah BASKAYA
| www.hesido.com
|

Received on Tuesday, 9 May 2006 00:52:51 UTC