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Recently, I started building a site with a lot of transparent image elements. The trouble was the the client required support for IE6 as well as IE7. Now, IE 6 and lower do not support transparent PNGs out of the box, but I knew that there were workarounds for that.
The question was, which workaround to use? One method I saw involved using an Explorer "behavior." Unfortunately, this solution required loading and HTC file, which is an ActiveX control. ActiveX controls aren't loaded in IE6 with default security settings. Maybe there is a workaround for that, but I couldn't find it in a timely fashion. Besides, the HTC solution requires an HTC file and a special GIF file be stored on the server. Adding mysterious stuff to the client's file tree is something I really like to avoid.
Then I ran across a brand new article (based upon a much older article) at A List Apart: Super-Easy Blendy Backgrounds. This article describes a pure CSS technique of getting image transparency to work in IE 6.
The core of the solution is as follows:
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader( src='PATH_TO_PNG', sizingMethod='image');" display: none.As I understand it, the way all of this works is that AlphaImageLoader displays the specified PNG as the background-image of the wrapper div; and AlphaImageLoader respects PNG transparency. The problem is that the physical PNG image overlays the wrapper div, effectively hiding the transparent background PNG. Hiding the original PNG with display: none solves that.
I did learn a couple of things while implementing this solution:
background-image: url, for instance.sizingMethod, because I wanted my PNGs to behave just like regular images, not to scale to the size of their container.The Web is a medium, like television and cinema are media. But paper, ink and oil paint are also media. Do we talk about "drawing addiction?" How about "newspaper addiction?" Not really. Only new media are addictive -- only electric media -- technology.
I'm not disparaging Marie Winn, I do love her vision of TV as the natural medium of the commercialized counterculture. But is that wrong?
There is an unfortunate dogma in the arts, that newness is cheapness. Now, I love the new, and I love the cheap. But just because I have to plug my media into a power outlet, that alone doesn't cheapen anything. At least for me.