CSS sliding doors technique for buttons, IE8 problem

I used sliding doors technique, explained here:

http://www.oscaralexander.com/tutorials/how-to-make-sexy-buttons-with-css.html

With only one exception, that I decided to add one more image for "hover" effect.

My code works well for all browsers, except IE8 (and maybe earlier versions).

a.submit-button:active and a.submit-button:active span are simply blocked by "hover" and never work.

Does anyone knows solution for this?

This is testing page: http://websvit.com/temp/button.html

Thanks a lot in advance!

<style type="text/css">

.clear { /* generic container (i.e. div) for floating buttons */
    overflow: hidden;
    width: 100%;
}

a.submit-button {
    background: transparent url('images/button-1b.png') no-repeat scroll top right;
    color: #fff;
    display: block;
    float: left;
    font: bold 13px sans-serif, arial;
    height: 28px;
    margin-right: 6px;
    padding-right: 18px; /* sliding doors padding */
    text-decoration: none;
    outline: none;
}

a.submit-button span {
    background: transparent url('images/button-1a.png') no-repeat;
    display: block;
    line-height: 14px;
    padding: 6px 0 8px 24px;
} 

a.submit-button:hover {
    background-position: right -28px;
    outline: none;  /* hide dotted outline in Firefox */
    color: #fff;
}
a.submit-button:hover span {
    background-position: 0px -28px;
} 

a.submit-button:active {
    background-position: right -56px;
    color: #e5e5e5;
    outline: none;
}
a.submit-button:active span {
    background-position: 0px -56px;
    padding: 7px 0 7开发者_开发问答px 24px; /* push text down 1px */
} 

</style>

And this is the button:

<div class="clear">
<a class="submit-button" href="#" onclick="this.blur();"><span>Hello All</span></a>
</div>

alt text http://websvit.com/temp/button-1a.png alt text http://websvit.com/temp/button-1b.png

all browsers, except IE8 (and maybe earlier versions).

I checked and your prefect in IE7. IE6 performs properly but you have that pesky png transparency issue.

You might try using the :focus pseudo class. IE8 may respect that where it didn't respect :active.