What is the difference between rgb and rgba

Problem with using this and other CSS3 color styles is that it isn't always supported. Here is a link I found that tells you which versions of browsers support it. Declaring alpha in CSS would look like this rgba 0, 0, 0,. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Asked 7 years, 4 months ago. Active 1 year, 5 months ago. Viewed 69k times. Are there differences between the two other than opacity?

Why isn't it convention to use RGBA. I'm assuming this since I am just now stumbling onto this Are there other limitations that should be know when using rgba for the web? Is there a shortcut to declare opacity beside a color shortcut? Other important information? Improve this question. See dev. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. I know the difference between both — rgba is just rgb but with alpha for opacity. The thing is, it has been months or even years that I am using rgb with opacity values.

It has always worked for me. Makes me wonder if there's an advantage to use one if both works the same? Also I was told by a coworker that rgba value will only work for background colors, but then again, I did some tests in codepen and it works on Edge and Chrome.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's the browser translating what is essentially an "incorrect" value set in rgb with an opacity value. If you look in the browser dev tools under the computed tab, you'll notice that the rgb values are computed to rgba at least in Firefox.

Also I was told by a coworker that rgba value will only work for background colors : Your coworker is wrong. I wouldn't say that. You'll never notice a performance hit, but you'll make your browser do less work if it doesn't have to "fix" your incorrect values being passed to the rgb set.

Update : rgba is an alias for rgb , so it's really not fixing anything, it's simply passing to rgb anyway. Here is some documentation on rgb and rgba - specifically the aliasing of the functions:. Differences in different cases?

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