Stretch and scale a CSS image in the background - with CSS only

CSS:

html,body {
    background: url(images/bg.jpg) no-repeat center center fixed;
    -webkit-background-size: cover; /* For WebKit*/
    -moz-background-size: cover;    /* Mozilla*/
    -o-background-size: cover;      /* Opera*/
    background-size: cover;         /* Generic*/
}

Using the code I mentioned...

HTML

<div id="background">
    <img src="img.jpg" class="stretch" alt="" />
</div>

CSS

#background {
    width: 100%; 
    height: 100%; 
    position: fixed; 
    left: 0px; 
    top: 0px; 
    z-index: -1; /* Ensure div tag stays behind content; -999 might work, too. */
}

.stretch {
    width:100%;
    height:100%;
}

That produces the desired effect: only the content will scroll, not the background.

The background image resizes to the browser viewport for any screen size. When the content doesn't fit the browser viewport, and the user needs to scroll the page, the background image remains fixed in the viewport while the content scrolls.

With CSS 3 it seems this would be a lot easier.

CSS3 has a nice little attribute called background-size:cover.

This scales the image so that the background area is completely covered by the background image while maintaining the aspect ratio. The entire area will be covered. However, part of the image may not be visible if the width/height of the resized image is too large.

You could use the CSS3 property to do it quite nicely. It resizes to ratio so no image distortion (although it does upscale small images). Just note, it's not implemented in all browsers yet.

background-size: 100%;