Received an email from Marc Cain, who informs me that the page renders just fine on Apple OSX. He’s run it on Camino, Safari, and oddly enough, the Mac version of IE5, and it renders just fine. As in *nix, the Gecko family (Mozilla, Netscape, Galeon) also renders correctly.
There’s a bug in Konqueror 3.1.4 that causes the main body to remain stationary while the title and sidebar elements scroll. If anyone knows a workaround, let me know. This is one I’d definitely want to fix.
Basically, the operative element is in the background property background: #333 url(sharp.jpg) no-repeat fixed 0 0;. The fixed 0 0 value tells the browser to keep the background image fixed and aligned to the top-left corner. The individual sections use a modified version of the image, which is blurred and darkened, but has the same dimensions and alignment. Since both the foreground and background images are aligned and (theoretically) fixed on the canvas, the effect should be that of scrolling text on a translucent background.
This is all standard CSS and HTML stuff. There are no Javascript or image hacks involved in the process. You’re welcome to view or swipe the stylesheet for this page, and if you have any suggestions, let me know.
NP: Solang, Sogar