Background Manipulation

Solid Backgrounds

To change the color of the background from the default gray, use the Netscape extension (read not HTML extended... so other browsers won't necessarily support this stuff) to the <BODY> tag like so:

(Colors are represented in hex values.)

Here's an example page.
And here is another.

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Patterned Backgrounds

Patterned backgrounds aren't any harder than solid color backgrounds. The <BODY> tag should look something like this, instead:

This Netscape extension (see above) looks for your specified image file and will tile that background of the window with that image. The only way I've heard of to avoid the tiling mechanism is to create a huge background image that will fill the screen and leave no room for replication.

Here's an example of a really crazily textured background pattern.

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Changing Text Colors

Sometimes you'll want to change the color of you text and links so everything is visible against your new background. There are four more optional fields to add to the <BODY> tag to change text colors.

<BODY TEXT="#rrggbb">: This will change the color of the text that is black by default.
<BODY LINK="#rrggbb">: This will change the color of the links that haven't been followed yet -- the ones that are blue by default.
<BODY VLINK="#rrggbb">: This will change the color of the visited links -- by default, they are purple.
<BODY ALINK="#rrggbb">: This will change the color of the "active" links -- "active" links generally aren't seen unless you hold the mouse button down on a link without releasing immediately. By default, they are red.

Here is an example of a page with
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FF9966" TEXT="#996666" LINK="#669999" VLINK="#336666" ALINK="#663366">

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Links to Swatches

Here are a couple of spots that've got a bunch of solid colors all laid out for you with their hex values:

Background Colors

RGB Hex Triplet Color Chart

Netscape Colours

I've found a lot of archives of patterned backgrounds, here are some good ones:

The KPT Backgrounds Archive

H's backgrounds

Julianne's Backgrounds (this is an extensive collection.)

SaberSpace: Backgrounds

BEACH RaT isn't an archive of swatches, it's a good tool for converting RGB to HEX values... it even shows you a sample of the color you come up with, too.

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Last updated 22 august 95 by katie