I’d suggest DD_belatedPNG by Drew Diller, but it’s been a while since I gave up on IE6, maybe there’s something even better out there by now.

@Dave DeSandro: Interesting script there! However, I’m afraid you missed my point a bit. Even having to go to your site (or any site) to do the conversion is too much of a hassle just to change a color or it’s transparency a little bit. If you are suggesting that somebody could build a javascript solution for that, your point is valid of course, and such a script would be interesting. However, what happens to this little percentage of users that have disabled js? In most cases where rgba backgrounds are used, the text would be completely unreadable without them.

You can’t be spontaneous in your CSS and changes are difficult. Every time you want to use RGBA, you have to resort to some converter to create the png and it’s data:// URI. Unless you are some kind of a cyborg with an embedded base64 encoder/decoder in your head

I’ve been playing around with the canvas element lately. Since the image it outputs is encoded in data URI, I’ve found a shortcut to for those converters – just create the canvas in HTML. I’ve developed a quickie canvas creator that uses jQuery so you can just plug in the code for the canvas element and not worry about all the other HTML and JS. Might be of use for some of the rgba work arounds.

By the way, your site is amazing!! Great design!

Here’s a blog post I read recently about the reasons that there aren’t many female geeks around: http://blog.sugarenia.com/archives/rantings/on-women-in-tech . I had read a better one somewhere in the past but I can’t seem to find it now. :/

You can easily make the generated image 10×10 if you change the following line:

$img = @imagecreatetruecolor(1,1)

to

$img = @imagecreatetruecolor(10,10)

Haven’t tried it, but it should work.

As for the gender part, you’d probably be surprised to learn that the first programmer ever was a woman, and the first compiler ever was also written by a woman.

BTW, great blog with very useful info. And besides that it’s always nice to see more women who write about this kind of stuff and at this level. It should not matter of course, but I think it’s still special.
Anyway, glad I landed here

Article updated

Again, YOU ROCK!

I really am excited at the idea of making RGBa work across browsers with something as easy as this. If PHP4 ends up being out of the question, I’ll ask to change servers. I want a playground where I can test out fun stuff — not be stuck in the dark ages!

I will try to investigate it further. If it only works with PHP5+ I should at least state it in the post so that people know it in advance. I guess that if I find out why it doesn’t work on PHP4 it won’t be too hard to fix it though.

The answer to the GD version is: bundled (2.0.28 compatible)

However, I do have MAMP installed for local testing which is PHP5.2.5; GD: bundled (2.0.34 compatible)

So, I’ll also try getting it to work there so that I know how to use it properly, but would still love help making sure it can work on the “live” server, if that is possible. Certainly, I am not asking you to write anything special to make it work for less than PHP5. I can always ask my host if they have a PHP5 server to move me to, if I figure out how to use it right on MAMP.

I have gotten it to generate the png on my local server. I think I’ve not pointed to the right place in the css for that attempt.

Don’t worry about eating up my weekend, I’m always happy when my scripts help someone and I consider it my obligation to help when there’s an issue with them.

PHP Version 4.4.9 is the answer for what version of PHP is on my server.

 < ?php phpinfo(); ?> 

as the only contents and navigating to it.

PS: WordPress somehow messes up the code above. There should be no empty space between < and ?php

The image “http://example.com/ww_site/rgba.php?r=255&g=30&b=100&a=50” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

So, does this help us figure out what my problem is?