Journal

PNG Transparency in IE6

Dec 6th, 2007 | Posted by Dimchevski in CSS

I've always wanted to work with PNG-24 images on the web and not just because they offer greater compression and color depths compared to GIF but most importantly for their alpha-channel transparency and antialiased edges. In that way it's easy to create a single file that looks and works equally well on any background.

However I've stayed away and the main reason - up until Internet Explorer 7 there has been no native support for PNG alpha-channel transparency in its earlier versions.

If you don't care about IE6 users, it's fine - most modern browsers like Firefox, Safari and Opera(version 6+) fully support PNG transparency. Otherwise to keep those IE6 guys happy and treat them equally, you have to do a little more.

Check out these links for an easy fix:
www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/demo/
webfx.eae.net/dhtml/pngbehavior/pngbehavior.html

Or if you want to delve more into the subject:
www.satzansatz.de/cssd/tmp/alphatransparency.html
24ways.org/2007/supersleight-transparent-png-in-ie6

Personally when I was building dimchevski.com I used Angus Turnbull's fix and got it running in minutes but now I think it's a little bit outdated and maybe a better workaround would be Drew McLellan's SuperSlight.

In any way you no longer have to worry as there are ways to make alpha-transparent PNGs work in Internet Explorer 6 and lower.

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