Since I'm always sticking to CSS 2, it was a (pleasant) surprise for me today to find out that CSS 3 supports alpha channels in colors. That allows for a nice range of effects. But - which browsers (and from what version) support this? Is it safe to use this today, or are we better off by still making a 1x1px png image and adding the IE6-filter-hack?
+1
A:
Here is an article detailing support for that in various browsers.
You probably should do this with a PNG image and fall back to something reasonable for IE 6. And you don't want that PNG image to be 1×1 px² large because tiling such very small images is painfully slow in some rendering engines. Making the image 100×100 px² doesn't cost you anything :-)
Joey
2009-11-19 08:51:01
Ugh. Ugly. Guess it's a while still before we can start using this. And thanks for the tip about the picture size! I hadn't thought about that (although it seems pretty obvious now)!
Vilx-
2009-11-19 08:54:19
I fell in that trap a few years ago. It's not fun if you can watch while the browser renders the background ... and again on scrolling :-)
Joey
2009-11-19 08:56:24
Actually, that explains the mysterious slowdown I've been having with IE on one of my webpages! XD
Vilx-
2009-11-19 09:12:25
I traced it down to the background image, but was unable to determine why it was like that. Now I know.
Vilx-
2009-11-19 09:13:01