Howto: Transparent PNGs in IE

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/

I found that today in a desperate search for how to do transparent images without ruining everything else.
Of course, since it came out on top of the search results, it wasn't really desperate in the end...

I'm sure some people will find it handy. Even if you don't, there's a cool car to drag around :)

Unfortunately, all it's done for me is taught me the depressing fact that JPG is the best format that can be used for my banner images and it, annoyingly, lacks an alpha channel, so any other thoughts regarding transparent images that don't look horrible (and actually load within a minute) are welcome!

Cool! Here is a better solution tho': http://explorerdestroyer.com/

Most people just find a solution that doesn't involve transparent images. Even something as kludgy as two versions of the site; one with transparent images and one without. If you've got SSI active on your server (you probably do) then you can add code to display the appropriate version of the site depending on the browser being used.

Honestly though, you're better off not using trasparencies as a major design feature of your site.

Remember, not everyone has got javascript switched on!

Why bother with SSI? You can do it with CSS. The least you can do is take advantage of Microsofts poor CSS support. Here's a little snippet

#body
{
	background-image: url(bodyie.gif);
	color: #FFF;
	margin: 0 10%;
	padding: 12px;
	border: 1px dotted #FFF;.
	
}
body>#body
{
	background-image: url(body.png);
}

Since the > selector is ignored by IE, any styles in that block is only going to be run on better browsers, who all have proper PNG support.

Sneaky. I like it :)