Ethan Marcotte improved and codified a technique I roughly used a couple years ago on a project, but felt a bit kludgey about: allowing the browser to auto-resize images to allow for fluid grids/pages.

If you’ve been looking at the little test case on Windows, there’s a good chance that the image quality, well, looks awful as it scales down. The challenging bit is that this isn’t a browser-specific problem, but a platform-specific one: native image scaling on Windows just, well, kind of sucks.

On IE, he has fluid images replaced by a spacer image, and then uses AlphaImageLoader to have IE render the image well, and resizes the spacer image on browser resize, making IE work reasonably. Firefox 2.0 and earlier on Windows remains janky. Still not perfect, but certainly much better.