Opacity Effects and CSS Standards

In the newest skin, I get the opacity effect in the content and sidebar areas by using a PNG file with alpha transparency for the background image. Alpha transparency simply means that the file has areas that are partially transparent. Only PNG files support this kind of transparency. (GIF files can have areas that are completely transparent, but not partially transparent.) Unfortunately, Internet Explorer does not support PNG files with alpha transparency, so the skin will look a little different in IE.

Actually, this now applies not only to the latest skin but also to two other skins that use the opacity effect ("Strawberry Letter 2003" and "Lost My Marbles"). I used to use non-standard CSS hacks to get this effect in these skins, but I have changed them so that they use PNG files instead.

Why did change these skins to use PNG files instead of using the hacks to get the same opacity effect? Because I wanted all the stylesheets to validate.

When I used IE as my primary browser, I would go by how IE rendered things when creating layouts. Then, I would get upset if I had to change things to accommodate other browsers. Now, I realize the problem was with IE and not all the other browsers. I also now understand why standards are important. Proper support for standards is yet another reason to switch to browsers like Firefox or Opera. If Microsoft wants Internet Explorer to be competitive, they need to add PNG alpha transparency support and better CSS standards support to future versions of their browser.