I sense a designer’s dillema in the near future.

I sense it, because the next release of Internet Explorer is reported to be fully compliant with .PNG graphics and alpha transparency, and like all things that microsoft (or apple or linux or mozilla for that matter), there is certain to be an influx of people stepping forward to exploit the newfangled technology to its fullest extent.

What is this, this .png alpha-correction that I’m talking about? It’s a transparency issue. IE doesn’t support it terribly well; Firefox and Safari are pretty effective with it. There are some fixes for it for IE, but like all patchwork fixes, they are temporary solutions to a long term problem.

And while this certainly seems to be a fantastic step forward for designers in terms of what they’re capable of doing with a website, I’m a little skeptical about a few things, the most pressing of which is the very use of transparent elements in our webdesign today. I’m not sure if this is a common lament or not, but whenever I think of a transparent div overtop of an image backdrop, I’m instantly reminded of teenaged myspace profiles and emo-centric design. It’s troubling, really.

There are certainly some positive elements to this, however. Having alpha correction will lead to simpler solutions to dropshadows, glass-effects, the seemingly omni-present 2000px-wide backdrop to accomodate a wider audience. All these problems will, hopefully, go away with better support in the world’s most popular browser.

But keep in mind a few things here: improper use of the transparency offered up will certainly result in heavy-duty render jobs by our most modern browsers. Think about multi-layer transparency; a transparent layer upon a transparent layer upon another. Ad infinitum, if you want. A rendering, load-timeing nightmare.

And those are just issues of practicality. But what about the actual aesthetic worth of transparent elements in web design? I’m in the process of setting up a new design for my upcoming site, Mixtaping, and I want to use transparent elements; I find myself struggling with this. The glossy transparent look is, of course, quite faux: photoshopping and selective image placement, no IE-based png fixes here, but that is beside the point. I find it to be eye-pleasing, but I could very well be wrong. In the case of a few thousand of the aforementionned myspace pages, I can certainly see how a transparent background to an element would be downright frightning to the average designer. So, I suppose there is room for debate here.

But I’m just one (Canadian, bearded) man - what do you think? Will the transparency fad catch on, once IE7 picks up its own slack and adds support for it? Or am I just theorizing much ado about nothing? Free good-vibes and karma per comment in response.

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