Old HTML Thing...

I remember, back in the day when people used the <b> tag instead of that stupid <strong> tag (I hate that tag!), transparent PNGs just didn't happen, yet it was posssible to make a transparent image with such pitiful programs as Microsoft Paint.

I may be mistaking this with some extra functionality that it offers for transparent gifs, but I doubt it.
This leads me to a conclusion which I think is accurate: There is a way via HTML to mask an image, much like a masked image in most 2d game engines, potentially making any image transparent by removing a particular colour.

I don't remember how this is done, and I can't find it anywhere. It seems that the standards people were too busy adding redundant plain-English tags like <Strong> than to keep track of that long forgotten attribute.

...So, does anyone perhaps remember such a thing?
Does it still exist?
If I am mistaken... do you think it ever will exist, perhaps once the powers that be give up on those redundant tags and start working on moving things forward?

Edit:
Oops, ranted a bit (a lot) there.

Never existed. It has always been dependent upon the image file itself to
already have the mask data in it. Gif files of course were the images that you
could do this with, and I don't remember Windows Paint being able to create
transparent gif files.

The last time I looked into html standards, I don't believe there was such an
idea on the board for inclusion into the html standards.

Gif is still the universal image for transparent images with HTML. Png files of
course have this ability also, but that's limited to all browsers except Internet
Explorer. And from what I understand, Microsoft has no intention of ever
meeting the html standards with regards to png files, or anything else for that
fact.

-Garrett

Thanks for the information, Garrett!
Very informative.

Come to think of it, I wonder if that Javascript transparent PNG hack I mentioned could be applied to mask images by colour...

You then rely on javascript being available and enabled in the client browser.

The rule about transparent images and interoperability is: Don't use transparent images. There is always an alternative design method which works around the problem partially or entirely.