@jdln -- I'm not sure if this is what she was going for and explained it wrong, or if this is another solution, however this worked for me:
- Apply the transparent PNG to a wrapper element
- Apply your fade to an element INSIDE the wrapper. This seems to force the wrapper element to display as well.
- Hide the wrapper element, show the content element using jQuery fade
For example:
/* HTML: */
<div id="wrapper">
<div id="content">I use this for a drop-down menu with a transparent PNG shadow for lte IE8 browsers
</div>
</div>
/* CSS */
#wrapper{margin-left:-9999px;}
/* jQuery */
$('#content').hide().fadeIn();
I use .hide() to make sure that the effect starts from the beginning every time, as I'm calling this from a hover event.
Hope this helped!