Intent to Ship: Relative Alpha Colors (CSS Color 5 alpha() function)

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Chromestatus

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May 26, 2026, 11:38:49 PM (3 days ago) May 26
to blin...@chromium.org, cg...@chromium.org
Contact emails
cg...@chromium.org

Specification
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color-5/#relative-alpha

Summary
Relative alpha colors refer to an origin color, and only change the alpha channel. The meaning of alpha channels is defined in CSS Color 4 § 4.2 Representing Transparency in Colors: the <alpha-value> syntax.

Blink component
Blink>CSS

Web Feature ID
Missing feature

Motivation
Relative alpha colors provide a direct CSS way to derive a translucent version of an existing color without rewriting its color channels. Authors currently need to duplicate component values or create separate precomputed tokens when they want “the same color, different opacity.” The CSS Color 5 alpha() function preserves the original color components and only changes alpha, which reduces authoring overhead and makes color tokens easier to reuse and maintain.

Initial public proposal
No information provided

TAG review
No information provided

TAG review status
Not applicable

Goals for experimentation
None

Risks


Interoperability and Compatibility
No information provided

Gecko: No signal (https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1396)

WebKit: No signal (https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/657)

Web developers: No signals

Other signals:

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

No information provided


Debuggability
No information provided

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?
Yes

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?
Yes


Flag name on about://flags
No information provided

Finch feature name
CSSAlphaColorFunction

Rollout plan
Will ship enabled for all users

Requires code in //chrome?
False

Tracking bug
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/492246715

Estimated milestones
Shipping on desktop150
Shipping on Android150
Shipping on WebView150


Anticipated spec changes

Open questions about a feature may be a source of future web compat or interop issues. Please list open issues (e.g. links to known github issues in the project for the feature specification) whose resolution may introduce web compat/interop risk (e.g., changing to naming or structure of the API in a non-backward-compatible way).

No information provided

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status
https://chromestatus.com/feature/5070160203481088?gate=6508530389614592

Links to previous Intent discussions
Intent to Prototype: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/69b4e4d0.050a0220.b9121.0139.GAE%40google.com


This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

Alex Russell

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May 27, 2026, 11:09:51 AM (2 days ago) May 27
to blink-dev, Chromestatus, Jason Leo
This seems extremely cool; is there perhaps an Explainer somewhere? This note on the Mozilla standards position request has most of that content and might help folks get more comfortable with the proposal as a stand-alone document;

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1396#issuecomment-4363280736

Best,

Alex

Vladimir Levin

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May 27, 2026, 11:18:09 AM (2 days ago) May 27
to blink-dev, Alex Russell, Chromestatus, Jason Leo
LGTM1

Thanks

Chris Harrelson

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May 27, 2026, 11:19:15 AM (2 days ago) May 27
to Vladimir Levin, blink-dev, Alex Russell, Chromestatus, Jason Leo
LGTM2

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一丝

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May 27, 2026, 11:22:26 AM (2 days ago) May 27
to blink-dev, sligh...@chromium.org, Chromestatus, Jason Leo
Thanks for reviewing this. Let me write one.

Rick Byers

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May 27, 2026, 11:24:51 AM (2 days ago) May 27
to Vladimir Levin, blink-dev, Alex Russell, Chromestatus, Jason Leo
Thanks for proposing a new feature ID to track support for this feature, but it looks like the report was missing some information and so got closed. Ensuring we have a good summary description and tracking of features is really important to enable web developers and AI coding agents to reason about the availability of the feature (eg. see webstatus.dev and the baseline project). Please add the requested information to the feature ID request and reopen it (or file a new one).

Rick

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Yoav Weiss (@Shopify)

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May 27, 2026, 2:47:40 PM (2 days ago) May 27
to blink-dev, Rick Byers, blink-dev, Alex Russell, Chromestatus, Jason Leo, Vladimir Levin
 
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