Shoutbox

I've uploaded few pics to my MSN Space, and some of them have come out with loads of tiny white dots on them. They only appear when viewing in IE but it's fine with Firefox.

Anyone know why?

Likely the image files you have uploaded are in PNG format, and where the white dots have shown up is where the images are supposed to be transparent. Transparency is merely a way the images are rendered in a browser, to allow parts of the image to be left blank and fade in with the background of the page.

However PNG files can use what is called "alpha channel transparency"

This form of transparency isn't supported in Internet Explorer versions 1 to 6, and decides to fill in the transparent parts with white dots, because it doesn't understand what it's suppost to do with the image fully.

However FireFox is one of the browsers that does support alpha channel transparency, and that is why the images are displayed correctly.

This problem will be fixed in the next version of internet explorer (version 7). However Internet Explorer 7 is still in BETA testing, it should be released in the near future. For more information on Internet Explorer 7 you can look here.

For now, you could convert the images to a .gif format, which uses a more compatible form of transparency (as long as you know how to preserve the transparent effect, if not you can upload them here to allow someone or myself to correct them).