Question

Is it possible to define a color in CSS by its name plus an alpha transparency value?

I.e.:

#mytext { color: red 0.5 }

rather than resorting to rgba like

#mytext { color: rgba(255,0,0,0.5) }

Answer 1

You can achieve the result you want this way:

#mytext{
  color: red;
  opacity: 0.5;
}

Note that opacity will affect the whole element, not just the text, so for example, if the #mytext element had a background color, that would also receive the opacity value of 0.5

However, I agree with Dai, using color names instead of hex or rgb codes isn’t something you should rely on too much. It’s an ugly color palette to work with.