<quote>WHAT IS THIS?
An image with a transparent background is like a painting on a window: you can see all sorts of exciting things behind it, but you can’t reach through to touch them. αlphaPun.ch changes that!
αlphaPun.ch will trace the opaque part of your png or gif image. It will then punch through the alpha channel (i.e. the transparent bit), so you can click on things behind it.
WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON?
αlphaPun.ch creates a mask for the opaque part of your pic, along with masks for the clickable content behind it. These masks are placed above the actual image. Clicking a link’s mask will trigger a click on that link.
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Essentially, if you put a hyperlink under a PNG, alphapunch will create a click-mask that allows you to click anything that is clickable underneath the PNG's transparent areas (alpha-channels)
As a Safari user, I actually totally agree, and it was a hard choice to leave it out of the first iteration. The reason was that this was made for the 10K Apart contest (10k.aneventapart.com) and I was really, really struggling to get the code in under 10k. Having the extra functionality pushed me over the edge. I will definitely be making it support more browsers over time, and adding more options. Or, you could always fork it on github and add it yourself. (https://github.com/nwtn/alphapun.ch) :)
From the site: "αlphaPun.ch will trace the opaque part of your PNG or GIF image. It will then punch through the alpha channel (i.e. the transparent bit), so you can click on things behind it."
What are we having trouble understanding here?
EDIT: Here I am, using elinks: http://i.imgur.com/UaX0M.png I'll remind you that elinks's support for drag-and-drop is, err- limited. I nonetheless have no trouble understanding what alphapunch does.
oops! My apologies; I tried the site with firefox then with elinks, it wasn't until I tried IE that I hit the sweet spot of too-few-features-but-not-so-few-the-feature-check-doesn't-work. Sorry to3m et al.; you are right that fallback is horrendous and unacceptable, no matter the limitations of the contest.
The limitations of the contest were that it must support current versions of Chrome, Firefox, and IE10pp2, which it does in this launch version. Now that it's working in those browsers, further browser support and better fallbacks are my top priority.
Yes, the fallback is not adequate for a general release tool, so maybe I should have waited before posting it here. But, I thought people might still find it interesting, and I wanted some feedback before submitting it for the contest.
Apologies to those that are being frustrated by these limitations at launch.
It lets you upload a transparent PNG or GIF and will trace the opaque parts. It then spits out some HTML/CSS/JS that you can put on your site that allows you to click through the transparent parts of the image.
αlphaPun.ch will trace the opaque part of your png or gif image. It will then punch through the alpha channel (i.e. the transparent bit), so you can click on things behind it.
WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON? αlphaPun.ch creates a mask for the opaque part of your pic, along with masks for the clickable content behind it. These masks are placed above the actual image. Clicking a link’s mask will trigger a click on that link. </quote>
Essentially, if you put a hyperlink under a PNG, alphapunch will create a click-mask that allows you to click anything that is clickable underneath the PNG's transparent areas (alpha-channels)
"Punch Through" the "Alpha"