Having just had a call from a client saying 'love the new graph, but why is the background sky blue' and thinking 'I've never done anything with sky blue in my life! - what have I broken', I then proceeded to learn more about Microsoft's lack of standards support than I really wanted or could spare the time to do.
The upshot is that transparent png's work perfectly in all tested browsers, as well as sundry image viewers/editors but not in IE, sigh!
I wondered why I hadn't struck this problem before so I looked at a few of my older, gnuplot generated, transparent png's, which worked perfectly in IE. A quick look with gimp shows that gnuplot uses a different technique for transparency than does Matplotlib. The transparent colour info for the gnuplot image is R:0, G:0, B:0, Alpha:0, Index:254 while for Matplotlib it is R:255, G:255, B:255, Alpha:0, with no Index.
Now I don't know enough (er, anything) about the low level detail of the png format, but I wonder if it is possible to achieve the same result in Matplotlib or do I need to post-process (using ImageMagick or similar) to generate the same style of png or possibly gif's?
Robert