And now you can pre-order it at Amazon with a $35 rebate! I know this makes me a huge geek, but I’m so excited.

37 Signals has just announced no more IE 5.x support in Basecamp and their future products. Good for them, but I don’t think it’s completely applicable for the rest of the world, at least not yet. They develop technology and apps for web developers, who are always going to have the latest and greatest technology and browsers. Not so true of the rest of the world. For most web sites, especially those aimed at the general publich, I don’t recommend following their lead, as much as I think the world of the talented fols at 37 Signals.

This has been incredibly difficult to figure out and get right. The header in the page include a couple different PNG files — one for the barbary ape and one for the shader behind the nav items.

Turns out that in IE Win, you have to use some odd, non-compliant filter that only works in IE 5.5+ on Windows.

I started out at the wonderful A List Apart.

Seems there are a couple of good javascript hacks (see “Sleight” and Sleight for background images), but I wanted to see what I could do without additional proprietary browser-specific javascript.

So I found this blog entry on a site called Syntactic Saccharose — all about cross-browser PNG and transparency.

OK, so all that works for the monkey image, which is a <img> tag inside a <div> tag. But not for background images.

The only goofball browser is IE for Mac, which normally displays PNG images just fine trips up when using them as background images. Well, screw that. IE Mac is a dead browser and it is slow as hell, so I’m not going to support it. It’s not that bad — it still displays the image, but just shows it without transparency.

As for IE Win, I used a child selector in my CSS to show a somewhat half-transparent GIF file for IE Win, and then a alpha transparent PNG for more PNG-friendly browsers.

Yikes, this is too much trouble to go through to build a web page.