Subtil

As previously noted, the web site of Swedish Customs has got a new design. The first thing that strikes me is how it feels very much like the design of another Swedish government authority -- The National Tax Board. Is this due to the fact that both use SiteVision as publishing platform? Many other Swedish government authorities use the same platform but have very different design so that's probably not the reason why.

My next thought is that it's a good thing. The likeness to the National Tax Board web site signals Government Authority to me and will probably help me navigate the site with more familiarity if the likeness is more than skin deep.

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.

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