While the term “sandbox” may conjure up the notion of playtime for the development staff, in the world of software/web development they are all business. Sandbox—when used in the context of traditional back-end software development—refers to a separate server set up for testing and development.
In a earlier post I briefly touched on a graphics technology known as “alpha transparency”. It’s a bit of an advanced topic—so if you are just starting out in web design you’ll want to save this technique for later—but once you have the basics down knowing how and when to use transparency in images really opens up new website design possibilities. In this post I will describe what it is and why it’s so great—along with some possible drawbacks.
While there are a number of different methods which can be used to store images electronically, the three most popular file formats used on the web are GIF, JPG and PNG. It is these three types of image formats that I’ll be covering here.
