I am working on a website for a project, and I have a picture for the website background. I put a table over the picture and I want the table background to be transparent, no 100% transparent, but about 50%. Much like how the forum is, with the picture in the background and the somewhat transparent box over it.

Everything I have tried has either not worked, or has made the text transparent as well. I want the text to stay at full visibility. Is this possible?

Can someone with HTML and CSS knowledge please help me.

Use a transparent image? If it is a colour you can maybe use rgba (standing for red green blue alpha). Something like this would give you a 50% transparent red background.

background-color: rgba(255,0,0,.5);

Watch browsers that support this though. I am not sure which do, and of those that do it is probably only the recent ones. For older ones you would need to implement a fallback background.

Thank you, that worked like a charm. We are just doing this for a school project, and aren't going to publish them. So fallback backgrounds aren't necessary in this case, but I will remember that for the future.

Internet Explorer 9 is the first IE to support rpga so I'd use a fallback background just to be sure since IE 8 (and older versions) would have problems with it. (http://css-tricks.com/rgba-browser-support/)