IE8 will not render background-image when importing CSS - css

Question

I have a weird issue where IE8 doesn't appear to render my background image using imported CSS.
Because of IE8's problematic issues and its lack to support many CSS3 elements, I am forced to use conditional logic to load specific stylesheets for my site content. I am using MVC4 and my _Layout page has the following in the header:
<link href="#Url.Content("~/Content/Site.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<link href="#Url.Content("~/Content/DeprecatedSite.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if gt IE 8]>
<link href="#Url.Content("~/Content/Site.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<style type="text/css">
.gradient {
filter:none;
}
</style>
<![endif]-->
In my deprecated.css file I have the following:
#main {
background:url('/Images/iecollage.png');
background-repeat:no-repeat;
width:100px;
}
In my site.css, I have this comparable code for the same ID tag:
#main {
background:url('/Images/collage.png');
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-size:920px;
width:100px;
}
I had to use 2 differently sized images and attribute definitions to correct the way the browsers interpreted the Markup. I am comparing the results using IE8 and Chrome.
When I launch the site, the home pages reflect the appropriate corresponding images and renders everything as expected.
My problem occurs when I navigate to another page which resides outside the Home directory (if that really makes any difference with respect to the issue).
The page has the following in-line code:
<div id="spotlight" style="position:relative;left:-50px; top:2px; height:820px;margin: 0;width:650px;">
In my Site.css file I have the ID styled as such:
#spotlight {
background:url('/Images/orange_spotlights3.jpg');
background-repeat:no-repeat;
-khtml-opacity:.60;
-moz-opacity:.60;
-ms-filter:"alpha(opacity=80)";
filter:alpha(opacity=80);
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=0.6);
opacity:.60;
width:100px;
}
In the Deprecated.css the style is:
#spotlight {
background:url('/Images/orange_spotlights3.jpg') no-repeat;
}
In Chrome, the style gets loaded from the imported stylesheet. But in IE8 I get a blank area where the image should be loaded.
The quirky behavior I noted is that if I were to remove the following lines from the Site.css file, then both Chrome and IE8 will render the image but I loose the transparency effect in Chrome which is not the intent of separating the ID's to different stylesheets.
-ms-filter:"alpha(opacity=80)";
filter:alpha(opacity=80);
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=0.6);
opacity:.60;
Its as if the 2 stylesheets are confusing the browsers or something.
Any explanation would be greatly appreciated.
As it stands, I am thinking of simply scrapping any support at all for IE8 because its getting to be too much of a bother trying to create 2 different accomodations to render the elements.

Answer 1

If you're using MVC it may be a problem with the absolute path which is kind of what it sounds like is happening. (Try pulling up your developer tools in Chrome or FF and check out the console while doing a page reload see if you get a 404 on the image GET request)
You can try something like ../../Images/orange_spotlights3.jpg where each ../ is one folder level up. You could also look at using a helper like #Url.Content("/images/orange_spotlight3.jpg") or try the absolute path all together.

Answer 2

Ok, after doing some blundering with the stylesheets I managed to get both to play together. What I ended up doing was retaining the comments for all the previously mentioned lines in the
Chrome stylesheet except for opacity:.60
So my stylesheet that will be used to support all other browsers other than IE8 now looks like this:
#spotlight {
background:url('/Images/orange_spotlights3.jpg');
background-repeat:no-repeat;
opacity:.60;
width:100px;
}
The other stylesheet for IE8 remained as is and both pages render the image appropriately according to their assigned stylesheets.
Apparently the following attributes don't work well in IE8 and can obviously cause problems:
-khtml-opacity:.60;
-moz-opacity:.60;
-ms-filter:"alpha(opacity=80)";
filter:alpha(opacity=80);
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=0.6);
I have tested this using Firefox, Chrome and IE8. I have not seen if there are issues with any other browsers but I would imagine this should work with Safari as well.
What I still have no explanation for is why those elements affected IE8 browser when they clearly did not exist in its assigned stylesheet.
In the next revision of this site, I will definitely drop support for IE8 altogether. As much as I'd like to make it available to users having out-dated versions of IE 8 and earlier, its just added labor to try to keep up a dead horse. :-)