Is there no support to click through transparent portions of images on a page? I'm speaking for images like GIF or 8bit PNG with transparency as well as 32bit PNG with regards to the 0-valued alpha regions.

Take a look at this page in progress: http://derekstag.com

Note, this page is not fully compatible with IE on Windows right now (I had to break it to test something) but that's not the issue at hand here.

The first example of what I'm talking about is the tie on the left. It's a giant rectangle but obviously has transparent areas (I've had to save it as an 8bit PNG to keep the size down). If you click in any of those transparent areas the clicks still register on the tie image (div in this case). Using the CSS Z property you can position the image within a hierarchy which affects both its visibility as well as clickability. Nothing I have tried prevents the whole rectangle from being the click region.

Anyway, you can't actually do anything by clicking on the tie or anything behind it right now, so the better example is next...

The functional example is on the right - the BUY TICKET button which currently features a fuchsia outline and is a working link. If you move your pointer over its top half (where the ribbon from the garter overlaps) you will see that the click is going to the garter image and not the button under it.

The other thing you will notice is that you can also click in the corners of the button's rect.

I can probably solve the button's region with an image map instead of making the whole image "hot" but what about the garter overlap? Sure, I can add a piece of the garter to the button image, but that seems really cheap. It also means I can't re-use that button image or move it around.

Any ideas? I haven't been able to turn up anything on this subject searching the net, but it's likely because my search terms are too broad or too specific.