is there any way to make this work with a separate (-pie-?)background-size property? having to specifiy all background-related properties in one instruction makes it considerably less useful / reusable.

neither background-size nor -pie-background-size seem to work.

apologies if this is very basic, pie newbie here.

@vincentcr I agree, longhand would be very helpful. However there are significant technical and performance limitations to it, some of which I describe here: http://css3pie.com/documentation/known- ... #shorthand

My opinion thus far has been that if it can't be done in a way that behaves correctly with the cascade, and without sacrificing performance, then it shouldn't be done at all. However I'm open to being convinced that the pros outweigh the cons.

@jason thanks for your explanation, it makes sense.

I was curious if background-size is supported in 1.0.0. My isn't working. I'm hoping that I'm just implementing it wrong.

No, the background-size code is only in the master dev (2.0) code, not in the stable 1.0.0 release.

You can also use background-size-emu pure JS library, that adds support of background-size to ie6, ie7, ie8 and ie9 in quirks mode.
It's free and you can find it here: https://github.com/Metafalica/background-size-emu