Transparent Messages are a nice way to alert your users that something has happened. The alert is not ‘modal’ in the same sense that a standard message box is. The user does not have to perform an explicit step to dismiss this type of alert, simply moving the mouse will dismiss it.

Aza and humanized released their version of this back in September of 2006, it used the Mochikit Javascript framework. I have updated it to depend on Yahoo’s YUI toolkit instead.

It looks like this when you use it. (Styled with CSS so its easy to customize/update)

The code is as simple as this:

alert("Hello from the Transparent Messager");

You can see it in action on this example page. A few seconds after the page loads you’ll see a transparent message appear.

Download the js source here.