Color Profiles
I've been working again on something i've meant to do for a while, namely creating a set of several different color schemes for this sub-site. I'm very fond of the green, but now that I've created red and blue schemes I'm pretty pleased with those as well.
One thing that has made this task easy is the fact that I don't use much color here; or as I prefer to claim, I use it sparingly, so as not to overdo it. There are a few types of HTML elements, mainly anchors, which need to be re-colored for each scheme. Most of the page's color comes from the header graphic. Since the header graphic has itself essentially a monochrome color scheme, it's easy for me to duplicate it and use Acorn to do a Hue rotation to a new main color.
So I spent about three hours tweaking my CSS and my color choices until the new red and blue schemes were the way I wanted them. I checked the results, and decided that the last thing I would do before calling it a night would be to make sure I hadn't broken anything subtly in the CSS by checking the page with another browser, namely Firefox. When I did so, all of the layout and styling was still correct, but to my horror my beautiful vivid header graphic had become drab and washed out. Had I overwritten the file with a bad version by mistake? No, it still looked the same in Safari. The graphics don't show up right in Opera or Camino either.
After a bit of poking at it I think I know what the issue is. It seems that I unknowingly made my graphics with an explicit color profile embedded in them. This should be a good thing right, since the image contains exact instructions about how it is to be interpreted? As long as I kept using Apple software, or software built substantially using the graphics libraries Apple provides, my images looked great. When I used Firefox, or most other browser to view them? Not so much.
Apparently Firefox 3 could handle the color profile correctly, but by default it won't bother. In other words, most users probably don't have a clue that the feature is there, so they never turn it on, and they'll just think my art looks drab. Aaaargh!
Note: I'm aware that the Firefox coders have left this feature disabled by default because they think it's too inefficient, claiming a "10-15% performance hit" on important benchmarks. On the one hand, I applaud their doing the work to actually write this code, when most web-browser teams haven't even bothered. On the other hand, this is important darn it! If they want to claim that their browser is so modern and so great, they should fix this problem all the way, not just part way. After all, in Safari this feature is there and turned on all the time, and Safari is still faster. I'm also aware that I can convert my images to another color profile that will be closer to what Firefox blunderingly assumes by default. Although this is what I'll likely do in the end, it irritates me, since having to do so defeats the entire purpose of color profiles.