Should you use rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) or rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) for transparency in CSS?

Question

Should you use rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) or rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) for transparency in CSS?

What are the pros and cons of each?

Answer 1

The last parameter to the rgba() function is the "alpha" or "opacity" parameter. If you set it to 0 it will mean "completely transparent", and the first three parameters (the red, green, and blue channels) won't matter because you won't be able to see the color anyway.

With that in mind, I would choose rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) because:

1. it's less typing,
2. it keeps a few extra bytes out of your CSS file, and
3. you will see an obvious problem if the alpha value changes to something undesirable.

You could avoid the rgba model altogether and use the transparent keyword instead, which according to w3.org, is equivalent to "transparent black" and should compute to rgba(0, 0, 0, 0). For example:

h1 {     background-color: transparent; } 

This saves you yet another couple bytes while your intentions of using transparency are obvious (in case one is unfamiliar with RGBA).

As of CSS3, you can use the transparent keyword for any CSS property that accepts a color.

Answer 2

There are two ways of storing a color with alpha. The first is exactly as you see it, with each component as-is. The second is to use pre-multiplied alpha, where the color values are multiplied by the alpha after converting it to the range 0.0-1.0; this is done to make compositing easier. Ordinarily you shouldn't notice or care which way is implemented by any particular engine, but there are corner cases where you might, for example if you tried to increase the opacity of the color. If you use rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) you are less likely to to see a difference between the two approaches.