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A warning is given that there is no declared background when a color is declared regardless of the fact that a background is indeed declared! It is declared as transparent! To the best of my knowledge background: transparent; is valid CSS. It also keeps hovered tree like css menus on my new site layout staying blue (versus black) to give a nice visual of the hierarchy of the menu system. So warnings should not pop up for no background declaration if the background is declared (regardless of it's value so long of course as it is valid). Here is the CSS url... http://www.jabcreations.com/temp/xhtml/themes/theme-city_w3c.css (this file will not be modified during development versus the file theme-city.css will probally be modified and may contain temp. errors or other unrelated warnings. There are no other warnings or errors in this css file (and the xhtml pages all validate just fine).
I agree. We should not get a not-valid CSS just because not having a background-color which in many cases are defined using background images from a higher level.
@John While it's not explicitly worded, I gather the meaning is roughly equivalent to "you have no _color_ specified", not "you have no _value_ specified". After all, "transparent" is not a color (and according to the spec, it's not even a 'value', but a 'keyword'), and using it does not get around the possible problem the warning is designed to warn you about (that you possibly will not be able to easily read the text). @Robin It doesn't say it's not valid - in fact it says it "validates" - it merely lists "warnings" (not "errors") which _could_ cause problems. The statement could be reworded to leave less room for confusion.
This is the reference I'm going with... http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-color/#transparent According to this since CSS1, "transparent" has been a valid background value. So it is a valid value and I am assuming the validator is intended to validate against the level of CSS/(X)HTML...though there is no way I am aware of declaring the level of CSS...that is declared or in the case of CSS - used. If it is a valid value (regardless of it's type) then there should be no warning. So the warning is an error as it fails to recognize the valid value.
Again, the warning is about something that requires an opaque color to be satisfied. The entire purpose of the warning is screwed over if you allow 'transparent'.
Where does it say opaque color needs to be "satisfied"? Elements have their background set to transparent by default. So by your argument you should spam everything in the validator that does not declare any background color whatsoever. There simply is no reason to warn the webmaster that there is no background color set when the webmaster has EXPLICITLY set the background to transparent.
STUCK! A HREF tags... I need transparent as background-color or else, I have to write lots of separate lines for a href tags that falls on different background colors which are so many! ;-(
What I find annoying is that inline elements with a colour have a warning when no background is set - inline elements should be transparent by default - adding a background colour may obscure background text. Why should I have to copy and paste 'background: transparent' for elements that have a transparent background by default?
Ditto Bug #768: we moved the "level" of this warning to the lowest level, amongst other warnings of potential accessibility issues. I think this is the closest we can get to consensus. Moving to [close] this bug.