IE8 gradient filter not working if a background color exists

Question

I\'m trying to use the following CSS styles. They are working on most browsers, including ie7. However in ie8, the transparent background does not show and instead I get th

Answer 1

After glancing over at CSS3please I realized I was doing overkill with my IE7/IE8 gradient styles. Simply using the following style does the job:

filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorStr='#444444', EndColorStr='#999999');

Apparently, there is no need for the -ms-filter and zoom rules.