About 3 or so years ago, the senior designer at my previous job submitted a hard design to a client containing a banner with not-quite-rounded-but-almost corners that had to have transparency and would have to change color over time. As senior dev then, I never got to approve the design before it got out and I can still remember the horror when I witnessed what he had done.<p>I ended up trying a whole bunch of different ways to solve the problem, one of which was very similar to this method. As the author points out however, this does not work in IE8 among other things, and at the time this was a requirement... I ended up using different combinations with different levels of quality depending on the browser, a true nightmare which ended up eating a third of the budget for no justifiable reason.<p>In any case, the fact that we have to go through tricks like this to achieve both transparency and decent compression is pretty disappointing. But what I find maybe even sadder is the amount of resources we sometimes spend on things which seem incredibly frivolous, to me anyway. I'm sure Sapporo have pretty deep pockets, which the author rightly took advantage of, but that doesn't make it any less superficial.