Subtil

Guess a lot of you have run in to the problem of Internet Explorer (pre 7) failing PNG alpha transparency. So did I on a recent project. Everything's fine in Firefox, IE7, Opera etc. but an ugly grey background shows up in IE6 where transparency is expected.

There are plenty of fixes to this problem. Most of them rely on javascript or php. I tried a few but no success since they mostly seem to target inline images, my problem concerned an image placed as a background-image with CSS.

I finally stumbled across Christopher Schmitt's PNG Image Replacement Technique that combines the Fahrner Image Replacement technique (FIR) with Microsoft's filter property in order to activate the alpha transparency.

What I like about this solution is that it involves no javascript, no extra php hacks or extra gifs. It's pure CSS and handles only background-images but then that was just what I needed.

The IE Team over at Microsoft is locking down Internet Explorer 7 for shipping and has published a list of all the CSS changes made.

Attended @media2006 in London last week and had a great time. Met some really nice people and made a bunch of new friends as well as talked to some very approachable giants in the field.

Not to be confused with the VW-bug...

The capital letter W starts off 1px to the left of where it should if the following conditions are true:

• font-family: sans-serif
• font-size initially set to keyword: small on body
• font size then re-sized to between 83 and 90% on a container.

The following font-size values set on body (or your container of choice) also gets the job done without the down-sizing:

• 0.7em
• 11px
• 66%-72%

Dan Cederholm has just realigned simplebits. While doing so he decided it was time to hide all CSS from IE/Mac.

Is everything relative? At least pixels are - albeit in a charmingly weird way.

Swedens Government Interoperability Board has laid down guidelines for, amongst other things, Swedish Government Web Sites. The work they do is commendable but like so many they mistake pixels for an absolute lenght unit.