If You Use IE, Upgrade to Version 7 When it Comes Out

It'll make my life a hell of a lot easier since that version is supposed to support alpha transparency for PNGs.

I'm currently re-vamping my website and a number of my graphics are PNGs with an alpha channel. It really makes it easy to blend something in that has, say, a modest drop shadow if the browser will just render it for you on whatever background you have. Firefox supports this, Opera supports it, and a whole bunch of browsers for Macs do as well. Guess which major browser doesn't support transparency with PNGs? Big hint: If you're a PC user, you're probably using it right now (if so, I really recommend switching to Firefox, but that's a discussion for another time).

Now, I can use transparent PNGs with IE, but it's a bigger pain-in-the-ass than it should be. All the other browsers just support the functionality so you just drop your graphics in with the standard img tag. Redmond's browser of choice, however, requires a convoluted process which will also give you a warning about running "unsafe content". Using the exact coding that Microsoft describes on their website. Every day I think more and more about switching to Linux or even one of them shiny Macs...

Fortunately, IE 7 is supposed to support transparent PNGs, so I should be able to use one codebase for my pages rather than having to check what browser someone is using and then write the appropriate HTML then (Note: IE will display PNGs, but it won't handle their alpha channels, if they have any).