You can do this with CSS3, but in this case, he just has a single bg image on various different divs. In CSS2, you can have one bg image per element, but you can have as many elements as you like. If those bg images have transparency, they will create the effect you see there.
In most cases, the p is redundant. It might help with
specificity (to override other rules on the same element), or if .maintext is used on other elements as well, like <ul>, you may just want a special style for when that class is applied to a <p>.
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