Transparency

Years ago, when I was doing more web design, and was employed doing it as well, the internet was stagnated. IE6 was the norm, and so things were very non-standard, and hackish as everyone had to deal with a browser that was not standards-compliant. Firefox was just beginning to get market share, and IE7 was under development, and finally the growth of the internet continued as a new browser war began and pushed forward standards and features.

At the time, one particular thing I didn't like was the fact that I couldn't use transparency in PNGs. As such, I couln't easily make flexible layouts using PNGs with only partial areas, because IE6 would render the transparent areas as white. Which would mean you would have to use GIFs for anything you would need transparent areas, which then meant you had to deal with the 255 color pallette limit, which wasn't a really feasable idea either. All in all, it meant for a lot of pain in site development.

I haven't really done much since then as far as web development. I knew in IE7 they fixed transparency settings for PNGs, however, up until today, I didn't know that that fix also allowed use of an even greater feature: translucency, or partial transparency. In fact I only discovered it by accident, because I found it on an example page of a different method for having an image fill the whole browser window and automatically resizing.

Having that feature in all the major browsers opens up so much more possibilities.