How to Display Opacity in Internet Explorer 8

Microsoft developed the latest Internet Explorer 8 to be the most CSS-compliant version to date. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult to acheive some of the same functionality as previous versions. Since past versions of IE displayed opacity with the non-standard CSS property filter:alpha(), this no longer works in the default standards mode.

Now, you can force IE8 to render your pages like a previous version of IE with the emulate meta tag. This tag must be placed in the head of your document and must only be below the title and other meta tags. The syntax for the tag is:

• <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7"/>

However, there is an Internet Explorer 8 only fix that will render some non-standard CSS in standards mode if you pre-face the property with: -ms-. For a description and full listing of the CSS properties allowed in this way, see the following link:

• MSDN Article on Valid CSS Properties