Idocs Guide to HTML
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Attribute for <TABLE ...>
BACKGROUND = "URL"

Usage Recommendation
Moving to Styles
This effect is done better with styles. See Table Background Colors and Images

BACKGROUND sets a background image for the table. Suppose, for example, that you want to set this image as the background image for your table:

deep sea background

Set BACKGROUND to the URL of the image: 

<TABLE CELLPADDING=8 CELLSPACING=0 BACKGROUND="deepsea.gif">

which gives us this table:

blah blah yeah yeah
groovy dude right on

Notive that we run into the classic problem with background images: the letters don't show up against the background. To fix this you could go to a lot of trouble using the <FONT ...> tag to set the letters to white in every table cell, but that's a lot of messy work. Instead let's do it the easy way and just use styles. First, we'll put a set of style rules in the <HEAD> section of the document: 

<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
<!--
.deepsea, .deepsea TD, .deepsea TH
{
background-image: url('deepsea.gif');
background-color:blue;
color:white;
font-family: sans-serif;
font-weight:600; 
}
-->
</STYLE>

These rules state that for any element with its class set to deepsea, or any <TD ...> or <TH ...> within a deepsea element, there are several rules:

Now we set the table to the deepsea class. Notice in the following code that we don't need to set the font colors for each individual cell: 

<TABLE CELLPADDING=8 CELLSPACING=0 CLASS="deepsea">
<TR> <TD>blah blah</TD>   <TD>yeah yeah</TD> </TR>
<TR> <TD>groovy dude</TD> <TD>right on</TD>  </TR>
</TABLE>

which gives us this table:

blah blah yeah yeah
groovy dude right on

For more information about table background colors and images see Table Background Colors and Images.

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