How to Make Div Background Color Transparent in CSS

How to make div background color transparent in CSS

Opacity gives you translucency or transparency. See an example Fiddle here.

-ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=50)";       /* IE 8 */
filter: alpha(opacity=50);  /* IE 5-7 */
-moz-opacity: 0.5;          /* Netscape */
-khtml-opacity: 0.5;        /* Safari 1.x */
opacity: 0.5;               /* Good browsers */

Note: these are NOT CSS3 properties

See http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/cross-browser-opacity/

How to make the background DIV only transparent using CSS

Fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/uenrX/1/

The opacity property of the outer DIV cannot be undone by the inner DIV. If you want to achieve transparency, use rgba or hsla:

Outer div:

background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.9); /* Color white with alpha 0.9*/

Inner div:

background-color: #FFF; /* Background white, to override the background propery*/

EDIT

Because you've added filter:alpha(opacity=90) to your question, I assume that you also want a working solution for (older versions of) IE. This should work (-ms- prefix for the newest versions of IE):

/*Padded for readability, you can write the following at one line:*/
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(
    GradientType=1,
    startColorStr="#E6FFFFFF",
    endColorStr="#E6FFFFFF");

/*Similarly: */
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(
    GradientType=1,
    startColorStr="#E6FFFFFF",
    endColorStr="#E6FFFFFF");

I've used the Gradient filter, starting with the same start- and end-color, so that the background doesn't show a gradient, but a flat colour. The colour format is in the ARGB hex format. I've written a JavaScript snippet to convert relative opacity values to absolute alpha-hex values:

var opacity = .9;
var A_ofARGB = Math.round(opacity * 255).toString(16);
if(A_ofARGB.length == 1) A_ofARGB = "0"+a_ofARGB;
else if(!A_ofARGB.length) A_ofARGB = "00";
alert(A_ofARGB);

CSS opacity only to background color, not the text on it?

It sounds like you want to use a transparent background, in which case you could try using the rgba() function:

rgba(R, G, B, A)

R (red), G (green), and B (blue) can be either <integer>s or <percentage>s, where the number 255 corresponds to 100%. A (alpha) can be a <number> between 0 and 1, or a <percentage>, where the number 1 corresponds to 100% (full opacity).

RGBa example

background: rgba(51, 170, 51, .1)    /*  10% opaque green */ 
background: rgba(51, 170, 51, .4)    /*  40% opaque green */ 
background: rgba(51, 170, 51, .7)    /*  70% opaque green */ 
background: rgba(51, 170, 51,  1)    /* full opaque green */ 

A small example showing how rgba can be used.

As of 2018, practically every browser supports the rgba syntax.

Making div element background transparent to background image CSS

If you want to set the background color to transparent you can do all of these.

background-color: ;
background-color: transparent;
background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);

but in this case, you need to set a different position here is the code I hope this is what you were looking for

<div style="height:100px;font-size:36px; border:1px solid red; position: absolute;">
  Some text goes here, need to try to make the background of this transparent? Any ideas?
</div>

How to Make a Div transparent with background color

You need to convert the color to rbg so you can use it with the rgba() property.

In this case, what you are after is:

background-color: rgba(90, 125, 0, 0.5);

The last of those 4 values being the opacity level (0.5)

How do I make a div transparent on a white body background?

UPDATED: Per your comment below, this question appears to be a duplicate of CSS - Opaque text on low opacity div?.

You need to change the opacity of the background instead of the element:

.box {
    rgba(255,0,0,0.6);
}

Or, since you are using a gradient, I would use this:

Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator

It will allow you to do semi-transparent backgrounds with a gradient.

Opacity of div's background without affecting contained element in IE 8?

The opacity style affects the whole element and everything within it. The correct answer to this is to use an rgba background colour instead.

The CSS is fairly simple:

.myelement {
    background: rgba(200, 54, 54, 0.5);
}

...where the first three numbers are the red, green and blue values for your background colour, and the fourth is the 'alpha' channel value, which works the same way as the opacity value.

See this page for more info: http://css-tricks.com/rgba-browser-support/

The down-side, is that this doesn't work in IE8 or lower. The page I linked above also lists a few other browsers it doesn't work in, but they're all very old by now; all browsers in current use except IE6/7/8 will work with rgba colours.

The good news is that you can force IE to work with this as well, using a hack called CSS3Pie. CSS3Pie adds a number of modern CSS3 features to older versions of IE, including rgba background colours.

To use CSS3Pie for backgrounds, you need to add a specific -pie-background declaration to your CSS, as well as the PIE behavior style, so your stylesheet would end up looking like this:

.myelement {
    background: rgba(200, 54, 54, 0.5);
    -pie-background:  rgba(200, 54, 54, 0.5);
    behavior: url(PIE.htc);
}

Hope that helps.

[EDIT]

For what it's worth, as others have mentioned, you can use IE's filter style, with the gradient keyword. The CSS3Pie solution does actually use this same technique behind the scenes, but removes the need for you to mess around directly with IE's filters, so your stylesheets are much cleaner. (it also adds a whole bunch of other nice features too, but that's not relevant to this discussion)

CSS make the background color transparent

Set background-color to rgba(red, green, blue, alpha) where red, green and blue are between 0 and 255 and alpha is between 0 and 1, with 0 being fully transparent and 1 fully opaque.

Also take a look at: How do I give text or an image a transparent background using CSS?.

How to make a div's background color translucent?

You can use the background-color: rgba() notation:

#theIdofYourElement,
.classOfElements {
    background-color: #fff;
    background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0.5);
}

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Edited to add the default background-color (for browsers that don't understand the rgba() notation). Albeit I was under the impression that all but IE do understand it (but I could be wrong, and haven't tested to be sure...).

Edit with thanks to @akamike.

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Edited to address question from OP (in comments):

which browsers don't understand rgba? will they all in the future, is this part of css3?

The best information I could find is the CSS Tricks' rgba() browser support table, with a link to a demo and 'more complete' compatibility table.

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