5
Bassman: partially correct. According to the CSS spec, any html element can use :hover pseudo tag which means he could have done something like this:
td#column {background-color:transparent;}
td#column:hover {background-color:#FC0;}
However IE (up to version 6) only applies the :hover pseudo tag when used on anchors (<a>); ignoring the selector on any other tag.
Working on the presumption that IE will eventually fix this rendering flaw, you can use the above CSS if you also use a javascript that makes it workable in IE. One of these is
IE7, a great project that uses javascript to augment IE's rendering capabilities. In addition, a search for
IE :hover yields many solutions to solve this one problem.