This is not a huge issue, but still this seems mighty lame: Internet Explorer 7.0 STILL doesn’t support the opacity CSS style and instead requires the continued inappropriate use of DirectX filters to specify opacity (this is in Vista build 5536 at least).
Not only is the filter behavior is a pain in the ass but it also seems like it’s breaking IE’s rendering. Take a look at this page:
http://www.west-wind.com/atlas/Chat/Chat.aspx
with IE and then with FireFox. There are a couple of oddities.
First notice that the status box on the right doesn’t show transparency even though it has transparency assigned to it. As soon as a background color is applied to the div – before or after the opacity is assigned – the div refuses to show the opacity.
Another really annoying ‘feature’ is that apparently the use of the Filter causes ClearType to not work. Notice that the entire document uses ClearType (if you have it enabled) but when the opacity is applied the text no longer seems to respect it on any areas the opactity applies to (in this case the table with the big background image - the rest of the page renders fine. This is if ClearType is turned on the machine level and/or for IE (IE 7 has a new option to use ClearType even if the OS does not).
Much of this seems petty, but I would really like to avoid to writing style tags like this:
.ControlOpacity { opacity: .70; filter:alpha(opacity='70'); background:white;}
.Opacity80 { opacity: .90; filter: alpha(opacity='90'); }
.BackgroundImage { opacity:.8;filter:alpha(opacity='80');background:url(../images/sailbig.jpg); }
And having them flagged by HTML validators that can’t make sense of the Filter style. It gets worse if you need to set opacity in code. There are countless places in my server code where there are checks for this crap. We really don’t need this and this is an easy thing to fix…
What are these guys thinking? Seriously, how hard could it be for the IE team to add this functionality? Even if nothing else happens than internally mapping the opacity style to the alpha filter.
Oh I know – “we don’t have the resources…”. Riiiight…
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