So I noticed this morning while browsing the grid in two different browsers on the Mac (Safari and Firefox)that there is weird color stuff that goes on.

All of the following applies to "unfinished" levels only.

Fact 1: Jpegs are either saved with a color tag or without a color tag. These color tags identify which "color space" the images live in.

Fact 2: If these jpegs are saved with a color tag- there are different color spaces that they can be. sRGB is the most common color space for the WEB.

Fact 3: On the Macintosh there are essentially two major browsers; Safari and Firefox. Safari is a color managed browser and Firefox is not.

Fact 4: On a color managed browser such as Safari if two identical jpegs are placed side by side and one is in the sRGB space and one is not (or is in a different space) they will appear to look different( most likely the sRGB tagged image will be darker)

Exhibit A: ...showart?show=jer.0006

Fact 5; on a non color managed browser such as Firefox for the Mac. The color profiles are ignored and the images appear the same.

Exhibit B ...showart?show=jer.0005&idonly=jer&seq=0

Fact 6: This seems to affect only Mac browsers as there are no color managed browsers for the PC.

Fact 7: When the grid is reconstituted as the level is complete, these differences in color space disappear because the entire level is saved as one image and this image has it's own color space (which is actually *no* color space or untagged as far as I can tell)

Implications: Minimal at the moment. This is a geekly little exploration in web browsers but one that we should pay attention to. Right now color managed browsers such as Safari will display images in different color spaces differently causing the appearance of non-blendiness (but only in an unfinished level).

So this really is only an issue for those on Safari for the Mac. However color-managed browsers are actually more sophisticated and we can assume they will be implemented more in the future. If and when this happens, it may result in weird "non-blendy" looks to the grid. Different people use different image editors adn those editors can save jpegs and gifs with different tags.

It seems the solution is easy but not particularly intuitive or enforceable: images should either be saved in the same color space(sRGB is the standard for web) or saved with no profile at all. Either that or perhaps there is some server side process that strips all incoming images of their profile.

More technical details can be found at this site:WEB BROWSER COLOR MANAGEMENT Tutorial - Test Page - ALL FILES have embedded ICC profiles Photoshop Color Management <www.gballard.net>