Enabling CSS RGBA Support in IE

One of the most frustrating things about working with newer CSS attributes is that while most modern browsers will support them in their latest versions, IE almost never keeps up. Such is the case with the RGBA color declaration which enables developers to specify an alpha transparency along with a color. This works great in the latest versions of all major browsers except IE. If the alpha transparency is 50% or greater IE will revert to the solid rgb color specified, otherwise it will revert to full transparency. I recently came across a little trick that uses the IE proprietary gradient filter which supports alpha channel colors. If you simply set both shades of the gradient to the same color you can achieve the same effect as the CSS RGBA attribute…