The <body background> tag allows you to use an image file for the
background of your Web page. A large image may only appear once
(depending on the size of the browser window), but smaller images will
be redrawn as many times as necessary to fill a page - a process known
as tiling.
If you write in your HTML doc:
<body background="kitty.gif">
Then kitty will appear in your background as many times as the
browser window and the size of your image will allow. If, for instance,
it's a small image - say, 20 by 20 pixels - and the page is being viewed in
a 480 by 640 browser window, then kitty would appear an astounding 768
times.
Keep in mind that there's no way to prevent a background
image from tiling. So if you want to make sure it doesn't, you'll have
to make the image wide enough and tall enough to accommodate large
monitors.
On this example page, for instance, we wanted our background image to create
a stripe down the left-hand side, and we wanted the image file to be as
small as possible. However, we didn't want more than one stripe to
appear, no matter how wide the monitor is (in other words, we wanted the
image to tile vertically, but not horizontally). To accomplish this, we
created a short, wide, striped image - 1,200 by 24 pixels - that looks
something like this (only larger):
![[Background
image - only smaller]](http://static.wired.com/webmonkey/html/stuff/littlebackground.gif)
That way, someone would need a browser window at least 1201 pixels -
or just under 17 inches - wide to see a second stripe, but the image
size is still quite small (25K). Note that the pixel-to-inch ratio is
adjustable, and varies from platform to platform; 72 pixels per inch is
standard, since it corresponds with the typographic rule of 72 "points"
per inch.
Note: Almost the whole browser gang supports background images
(including Netscape 1.1 and later, and all versions of Internet
Explorer). Only older versions of NCSA Mosaic and the AOL browser will
turn down your background image.
yourself.
