Firstly, PageUp People has a new website and it’s pretty sexy. The menu’s took some work to get right in IE6< - but nothing unusual there.
I have an interesting challenge at work at the moment, we are creating a new application that will act as a kind of portal for all the different applications we offer.
In this 'portal thingy', we'll have a collection of 'widgets'.
To allow for rapid development and customisation of these widgets we need to be able to create a new one simply by adding a new entry into the Widget table. This in itself poses interesting design challenges - You can't use background-images specific to any widget - they all need to be generic - The colors, number of rows, columns and amount of content is all unknown. It means that I can't use background images like I normally would.
As it turns out PNG 8's support for Alpha Transparency enables us to create some nice images with gradient highlights to make generic images sexier.
Using overflow to crop content and sizing all font's / padding in em's will mean we can control all aspects of the design from the CSS and a couple of inline widget-specific styles.
I'll put up an example at some point to put this in context.. But, PNG 8's alpha transparency has full support in all modern browsers except IE6< - But it degrades nicely in those browsers, all alpha channels are completely transparent similiar to .gif - on or off transparency. Similar to this Sitepoint example but a bit more complex.
I’ve had a quick look at using IE’s Alpha Image Loader filter to make the same thing work in IE6< but couldn’t seem to get it work..
If all goes well we’ll have an efficient widget making machine.