Talk:Transparency (graphic)

animation

Does the animation contribute anything to the article? I think it's distracting from the transparency. The dice picture on a checker background in Portable Network Graphics is a better example, though it does make sense to demo both GIF and PNG. Maybe animation that actually uses the transparency? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.224.65.15 (talk) 23:05, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

Internet Explorer's lack of support for partial transparency in PNG files is irrelevant.

IE 7 superseded IE 6 in 2006, and IE itself was superseded in 2016 by Edge. A couple of randoms still using a 14-year-old browser don't count as support that's "even more patchy". The reality is that any normal browser has supported alpha transparency in PNGs for the last decade and a half. This digital-web.com article points out that even in 2014 this was a misconception.

I've removed mention of patchy support from the article. 69.28.44.248 (talk) 23:33, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Support for partial transparency in TIFF files is misleading.

Currently, neither Firefox nor Edge support TIFF files at all. The fact that partial transparency isn't supported is irrelevant at this point. My understanding is that Chrome has also dropped support for TIFF, but I don't feel like installing it to find out. It's likely other browsers will follow suit.

Of course, TIFF files were never meant for browser images, so why are we using browser support as a metric anyways? As long as image editing programs support the transparency for conversion to other formats more suitable for icons, video game graphics, web images, etc., there's not really an issue with the format.

I've removed mention of support for TIFF files, as its truthiness depends on the context, which is outside the scope of this article. 69.28.44.248 (talk) 23:33, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Do people actually call partial transparency "translucency"?

Partial transparency is not translucency. Translucency is when light can come through, but you can't resolve objects behind the translucent material. Partial transparency is when the obscuring object isn't completely invisible, but you can still resolve objects behind it. See Transparency and translucency for more information.

In normal life, everything is partially visible, so we just say things are "transparent" or "not transparent"; there's no need for the term "partial transparency". In computers, partial support for transparency was implement early on because full support required too much memory or computational power, so the distinction became necessary when full support because more standard. But no image format I know of natively supports translucency at all.

If there are citations for this as a common convention in the computer world, it should be mentioned. Otherwise, I would suggest removing that definition. 69.28.44.248 (talk) 23:33, 14 September 2020 (UTC)