User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: December 11, 2012/@comment-3441771-20121212034223/@comment-4674838-20121212185209


 * I prefer to add a repeating background image which has a 70% opacity, which is a slightly different thing to having the CSS directly control the opacity.

That definitely works, and there's nothing wrong with doing it that way. However, this is not a deficiency of CSS -- CSS can do exactly the same thing. Here's a couple of examples:

The CSS opacity property changes the opacity of the selected node and all child nodes. For example:   The text is partially transparent, because opacity affects child nodes.

The text is partially transparent, because opacity affects child nodes.

For the purposes of setting the background of a Wikia wiki transparent, if you look in Firebug, #WikiaPageBackground doesn't have any child nodes in the HTML, so if you give it opacity, it doesn't affect any text or anything. So to reply to CzechOut, it's likely just your eyes playing tricks on you.

It is possible to make the background transparent of any color not only by setting background-color and opacity as I did above, but also through use of the RGBA color format:

   The text is NOT transparent at all, because RGBA's alpha filter doesn't affect child nodes in the HTML

 The text is NOT transparent at all, because RGBA's alpha filter doesn't affect child nodes in the HTML