IE7 PNG transparency support not native after all

Well this is really fun. Not.

It seems that the PNG transparency support introduced in IE7 isn’t native at all. It’s the same hack as in IE6, but applied automatically under the hood. The hack, or fix, whichever you decide to call it, is the method of using the DXImageTransform filter’s AlphaImageLoader function to introduce PNG transparency to your images, and if you combine this with IE’s way of doing opacity to elements in CSS, you get all kinds of perverted looking quirks.

The solution in this case, is to remove the opacity filter, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m facepalming so hard at this whole thing right now.