Idocs Guide to HTML
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Avoid the Most Common Mistake Made with BACKGROUND

The most common mistake made with BACKGROUND is to forget to set the background color of the page to something compatible with the background image. If you set a background image then set the background color to something of a similar shade, and set the font colors to something that looks good against that shade. There are many people who surf the net with images off in their browser. When a page with light fonts comes up, and the default background is also light, it's difficult or impossible to read the page.

Suppose, for example, that you want to use this image as the background for your page:

A dark background image

With an image that dark, you would naturally want to set the text properties to something light:

this code produces this 
<BODY 
    BACKGROUND="../graphics/darkbg2.jpg" 
    TEXT=WHITE 
    LINK=YELLOW 
    VLINK="#CCFF66" 
    >
this page

Take a look at what the page looks like if the user doesn't load images

If the user loads images, then the page looks fine. However, most browsers default to a light background, so take a look at what the page looks like if they don't load images. In the above example, it would be best to set the background color to something dark, like this:

this code produces this 
<BODY 
    BACKGROUND="../graphics/darkbg2.jpg" 
    BGCOLOR="#336666" 
    TEXT=WHITE 
    LINK=YELLOW 
    VLINK="#CCFF66" 
    >
this page

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