The Real Ryan J. Parker

Internet Explorer has an issue with rendering transparent PNGs: the transparency isn’t rendered!

Thankfully, however, there is a way to get around this problem by using some fancy JavaScript.

Bob Osola has a nice how to page here that provides the appropriate JavaScript and usage instructions for getting around this annoying problem.

It seems like this is still an issue for a lot of web developers so I hope you find this useful.

I’ve personally made use of Bob’s code at Which Team Wins? for the Team Travel Analyzer.

I use custom PNG markers for this analyzer, and the Google Maps API will handle the transparency issue without problems (as long as the extension ends in .png). Bob’s code, however, came in handy when I wanted to use these markers in other parts of the page.

If you’re going to use DHTML, AJAX, JavaScript, etc. to dynamically modify your page then you’ll want to wrap Bob’s JavaScript code inside of a function so that you can call it whenever you load a transparent PNG into a page.

Tags: png, transparent, ie