In my experience, PNG's often take longer to load and are usually bigger in filesize than JPG's and GIF's and so they never really became used on any great scale until recently, now that we have these super speed connections (mine's being upgraded to 10MB soon - thanks Blueyonder!).

This may not be the case for everyone though.. :)

Na pngs can be similar in size when on the same color level because they range from the lowest levels to the highest of 24bit true color

PNGs, even without transparency, do not render correctly in IE. Their color palettes are slightly off (darker, if I remember correctly). A shame because the PNG format is superior to others in terms of its functionality with alpha blending.

I'm doing most of my graphics in PNG format, since for gradients they compress the best in my optimization ware. It'll take a 1KB gradient image and reduce it down to under 200 bytes (in full True Color), for example.

I'll wait to use alpha channeled PNGs, as those files tend to be larger -- and my goal is to give better visual quality at lower file sizes (to save on the bandwidth bill). Just easier to make specific icons and use them (considering how small they are, it takes really no disk space).

Chris

I would use PNG in vB... BUT!

Everything in vB is .gif.... for example find "forum_link.gif" and rename it to "forum_link.png" within vbulletin (the code/templates) and repeat that process about 200 times for all the vB graphix and your done!

-b6

Have you tried a replacement variable?

yes, but there's gonna be heavy template chages throughout, hardly the speedy, quick and efficient solution

-b6

So change the templates then..... I was only offering a solution. :ermm:

Some format changes (like the collapse icons) require editing a js file, not only the template. vB still has hardcoding of images/padding/dimensions. It's why if the stylesheet is missing, you can still see the forum alignment, despite no images/background colors.

So editing the images from gif to png in vBulletin still requires more than simple template redesigning.

Chris

I am fully aware of the goals of the vbulletin-css.com team. ;)