Tis the Season for Impressing Your Friends (With CSS).

24ways kicks off with an article from Drew McLellan on using CSS3’s alpha transparency for specifying colors.

CSS3 introduces a couple of new ways to specify colours, and one of those is RGBA. The A stands for Alpha, which refers to the level of opacity of the colour, or to put it another way, the amount of transparency. This means that we can set not only the red, green and blue values, but also control how much of what’s behind the colour shows through.

While the feature itself isn’t new, support for it among mobile and desktop browsers has increased enough that investing the time into using it is no longer out of the question. With Google throwing its substantial weight behind advancing the web-as-platform, it won’t be long before RGBA* and other powerful CSS and HTML features are common.

*For those accustomed to designing in the browser, Molly Holzschlag extols the benefits of HSL (and A).