PNG alpha transparencies are something that most graphic designers long for on the web. The ability to overlay/fade something over a background, especially when it is dynamic content is amazingly useful. Drop shadows are probably the most requested, and while firefox, safari and IE7 support this behavior, IE6 simply doesn't do alpha transparencies at all (who would have guessed!).

There has been an interesting fix available for quite a while now from TwinHelix, which added support for IE6 using the AlphaImageLoader filter. This works great for a lot of situations, however it didn't support repeating backgrounds, which is something quite commonly requested (for borders and frames).

The same people who released the first fix, now have an alpha version of a small javascript include, which adds support for repeating backgrounds.

While adding these fixes does add a little more filesize, it can sometimes be a necessary evil to serve an extra 5-10kb of files to IE6 - in 2008, that is not a particularly large price to pay.

I know I will be starting to think a bit more about including some alpha transparencies in my designs now I know a viable solution is out there.