Tag: RGBA

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News Original

rgba.php v1.2: Improved URL syntax, now at Github

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I wrote the first version of rgba.php as a complement to an article on RGBA that I posted on Februrary 2009.
Many people seemed to like the idea and started using it. With their valuable input, I made many changes and released v.1.1 (1.1.1 shortly after I posted the article due to another little fix) on October 2009.
More than a year after, quite a lot of people still ask me about it and use it, so I decided to make a github repo for it and release a new version, with a much easier to use syntax for the URL, which lets you just copy and paste the color instead of rewriting it:

background: url('rgba.php/rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.3)');
background: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.3);

instead of:

background: url('rgba.php?r=255&g=255&b=255&a=30');
background: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.3);

I also made a quick about/demo page for it.
Enjoy 🙂

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Original

New version of rgba.php is out!

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It’s been a while since I posted my little server-side solution for cross-browser RGBA colors (in a nutshell: native rgba for the cool browsers that support it, a PHP-generated image for those that don’t). For features, advantages, disadvantages etc, go see the original post. In this one I’ll only discuss the new version.

So, since it’s release I’ve received suggestions from many people regarding this script. Some other ideas were gathered during troubleshooting issues that some others faced while trying to use it. I hope I didn’t forget anything/anyone 🙂

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News Personal

CSS3 colors, today (MediaCampAthens session)

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Yesterday, I had a session at MediaCampAthens (a BarCamp-style event), regarding CSS3 colors. If you’ve followed my earlier posts tagged with “colors”, my presentation was mostly a sum-up of these.

It was my first presentation ever, actually, the first time I talked to an audience for more than 1 minute 😛 . This caused some goofs:

  • When introducing myself, I said completely different things than I intended to and ended up sounding like an arrogant moron 😛
  • I tried not to look at the audience too much, in order to avoid sounding nervous, and this caused me to completely ignore 2 questions (as I found out afterwards)! How embarrasing!
  • At a certain point, I said “URL” instead of “domain” 😛

Also, I had prepared some screenshots (you’ll see them in the ppt) and the projector completely screwed them up, as it showed any dark color as black.

Apart from those, I think it went very well, I received lots of positive feedback about it and the audience was paying attention, so I guess they found it interesting (something that I didn’t expect 😛 ).

Here is the presentation:

Please note that Slideshare messed up slide #8 and the background seems semi-transparent grey instead of semi-transparent white.

By the way, I also thought afterwards that I had made a mistake: -ms-filter is not required if we combine the gradient filter with Data URIs, since IE8 supports Data URIs (for images at least). Oops, I hate making mistakes that I can’t correct.

Here are some photos from my session. If I did it correctly, every facebook user can see them. If I messed things up, tell me 😛

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Original Tips

Check whether the browser supports RGBA (and other CSS3 values)

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When using CSS, we can just include both declarations, one using rgba, and one without it, as mentioned in my post on cross-browser RGBA backgrounds. When writing JavaScript however, it’s a waste of resources to do that (and requires more verbose code), since we can easily check whether the browser is RGBA-capable, almost as easily as we can check whether it suppports a given property. We can even follow the same technique to detect the support of other CSS3 values (for instance, multiple backgrounds support, HSLA support, etc).

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Articles Original Releases

Bulletproof, cross-browser RGBA backgrounds, today

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UPDATE: New version

First of all, happy Valentine’s day for yersterday. 🙂 This is the second part of my “Using CSS3 today” series. This article discusses current RGBA browser support and ways to use RGBA backgrounds in non-supporting browsers. Bonus gift: A PHP script of mine that creates fallback 1-pixel images on the fly that allow you to easily utilize RGBA backgrounds in any browser that can support png transparency. In addition, the images created are forced to be cached by the client and they are saved on the server’s hard drive for higher performance.

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