making translucent .gifs

I'm designing for web, and I want to make a box that is white and has 50% translucency. So that things can be seen though, but they are faded so that text can go on top. I thought that this was possible, but I've been trying very hard, and its not working the way I expected. I've tried all sorts of things - matting and .gifs and .pngs and dithering -

- is it possible and how do I do it? Thanks.

tom

I'm not sure what you mean... it should work easily.... if the text is not visible enough try lowering the saturation of the image with the white box....or change the fon color....

show us a pic

GIF's can only be completely transparent, or completely opaque. PNG's support alpha transparency, so you can have a smooth transition to transparent, or just 50% transparent if you want. But they are completely unsupported in IE. So **** Microsoft for messing that up for everybody...

But I'm guessing from what you describe you could do that with CSS. You can make CSS boxes transparent as well. Though it isn't supported in every browser either.

How would I do that in CSS? Use a translucent background? I don't think that works, either...

what browsers is it supported in?

tom

prolly in IE5 + like everything¬!!

lazyroll: What? Translucent .PNGs are not supported in IE for one. No offense, but I'm getting kinda annoyed by all your useless posts. A lot of the time the post is not neccessary or just plain stupid. There is no need to post in every single thread, or multiple times in a row. Also, it helps if you use proper punctuation and capital letters. I like to think that this is a mature forum - please act accordingly. Thank you.

tom

why do you want to put a semi-transparent gif? Just make the portion of the image you want the "box" to go over a little whiter and desaturated - this way it will appear to have something transparent above...

But the boxes need to stretch, etc. with content. They need to be short with less content and longer with more content. Make sense?

tom

ok i thought you werre on about .gif's though!! those are supported

Originally posted by trhaynes
But the boxes need to stretch, etc. with content. They need to be short with less content and longer with more content. Make sense?

tom

I think using alpha transparency is what you are wanting, but it isn't well supported. IE does support that though.