Backgrounds

You've seen 'em used: they can make a page stand out in a field, or they can drown the page in glitz. Well, now you too can break into the wonderful world of backgrounds.

First, some background background:

A background is an image which is repeatedly tiled in the background on an HTML page, or a solid color background.
There can only be one background per page.
You cannot have different backgrounds in table cells (nice try!)
Users can overrise your backgrounds, text, and links in their Preferences. Don't feel bad -- you've probably seen some of the pages that made them want to do that.
If the user has auto load images turned off, he won't see backgrounds and (fortunately) Netscape also won't change your text colors unless you have BGCOLOR specified.

There are several parts to the background HTML. They are:

The BACKGROUND tag goes inside the BODY tag, and must appear before any of the document's content. Don't forget that part. To specify a background, just tell it the name of a GIF or JPEG file.
The BGCOLOR tag allows you to specify a background color. You can do this without specifying a background file, in which case your background will just be a solid color.
However, the BGCOLOR tag is good for some other things too. If Netscape can't find your background file or if the user has auto load images turned off, it will use the color instead. So, you should try to pick the predominate color of the image as the color.
Also, Netscape on Windows will use the background color as table borders (Macintosh and X actually use the background pattern, not a solid color). You'll also notice that the page background fills with this color while Netscape is waiting for the image to arrive (just think of the brain damage you can cause with a good neon color!)
Finally, if your background image is a transparent GIF (yup, you can do that), the BGCOLOR color determines the color "behind" the GIF. While that's moderately interesting, you can produce the same effect with a paint can in Photoshop.
TEXT allows you to specify a color for the text of the document.
LINK allows you to specify a color for links in the document.
VLINK allows you to specify a color for visited links in the document. Personally, I don't think it's a good idea to change these, but what do I know? Note that you can change these without changing the background at all, but they are used primarily to make your text readable on your background.

Here is an example of the HTML:

	<BODY BACKGROUND="./foo.gif" BGCOLOR="#000000" 
	TEXT="#ffffff" LINK="#00ffff" VLINK="#ffff00">

Now there is one important thing about backgrounds that you should understand: the document will not begin layout at all until the background file has been completely downloaded. This means that the user will be staring at: nothing! So, what do you do? Keep your backgrounds very very small, so they load quickly. Here are some small backgrounds (all less than 850 bytes).

So what are these numbers, anyway, this #FF00FF stuff? Well, it's the hexidecimal value of Red, Green, and Blue for that color. If you don't have a handy tool that will do it for you, check out the following sites:

Colors and Hex Equivalents from Rich Barrett
Background Colors from InfiNet
Color Ramper
An RGB to Hex color converter
ColorHex

If you're dying for some real backrounds to work with, try: