Hello Peeps - well it seems my luck is not in high-season. I’m battling a number of issues across all my projects… particularly issues created by various browsers. Tabouli, Softwhite and Italian Tile all have browser issues. Mailroom has a few design issues. I really ran into a snag with Italian Tile. That particular theme has an embedded color profile that’s not exactly standard. It uses NTSC 1953. I chose that profile because it was the one that preserved the richness of the colors the best. The Adobe RGB 1998 profile left the imagery very washed out after optimization - it was awful!

But before I get into all that, just an FYI that Hac seemed to figure out a bit more about the FrameManager solution. Since Leopard, we’ve been trying to figure out how to get that thing to work properly. I can’t even tell you what he has to go through, but since I have a 64bit G5 Quad running Leopard, he had to work some magic to get it right. The problem is, the solution is highly sensitive to your machine configuration… i.e. your processor, OSX version, etc. Not sure why though. At any rate, it’s a step forward in terms of showing and managing all the frames installed to iWeb. No ETA on frames yet though.

Back to iWeb Backgrounds 101… So a little background here about how iWeb themes are assembled. You all know that there’s the browser background area… the area where content does NOT reside. Generally you have a solid color or a repeating image assigned to that area. My themes have used both options. Aerolite uses an image fill as you know and in contrast, Foshay uses a solid color. Then you have the page background. The page is where your content resides and that too can use an image fill or solid color fill. I’ve used both.

If you ever want to produce a drop shadow around your page or you want to be able to let images “hang” off the edge of your page, you need to use an image fill for your page backgrounds… one that creates the illusion of a page edge (say) 50 pixels in from the actual page edge that iWeb defines via the Inspector. While that produces a very nice visual page, it presents some problems as well. The biggest inconvenience here is that the browser background color or pattern now has to be embedded into your page background image. It has to be in order to create the illusion of an inner page edge or a drop shadow along the page edge. When you take that approach, suddenly you have to be aware that when you compress your images, the browser background image may compress more than your page background image, creating a very different and visible result when you open the theme in iWeb.

My problem with Italian Tile here is similar in that, I do use a fancy drop shadow edge - a pseudo page edge that allows you to hang images off the sides a bit. When I compressed these images for the theme then, I *thought* I had it all perfect - in iWeb there was no visual edge between the page and the browser background. But when published and viewed through the various browsers, suddenly there’s a very obvious contrast in the way the images were displayed :-O

Here’s an example from Safari 3 and Firefox (latest version). You can clearly see the edge where the page background and the browser backgrounds meet. Ugh. This is happening because the browsers obviously read something in the imagery that iWeb, and generally speaking, your Mac does not. I’m a bit perplexed as to why I did not see this with Aerolite, but for that theme, I used the Adobe RGB 1998 color profile. The color profile is the one obvious difference. So, I need to figure THAT out before I can release this theme. The easy option is simply to not compress the images, but that’s pretty dumb - a graphics-heavy theme does not need any excess image weight.

:-/ Send thoughts, particularly if you’re a color profile wizard.