The <body background> tag allows you to use an image file for thebackground of your Web page. A large image may only appear once(depending on the size of the browser window), but smaller images willbe redrawn as many times as necessary to fill a page - a process knownas tiling.
If you write in your HTML doc:
<body background="kitty.gif">
Then kitty will appear in your background as many times as thebrowser 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 ina 480 by 640 browser window, then kitty would appear an astounding 768times.
Keep in mind that there's no way to prevent a backgroundimage from tiling. So if you want to make sure it doesn't, you'll haveto make the image wide enough and tall enough to accommodate largemonitors.
On this example page, for instance, we wanted our background image to createa stripe down the left-hand side, and we wanted the image file to be assmall as possible. However, we didn't want more than one stripe toappear, no matter how wide the monitor is (in other words, we wanted theimage to tile vertically, but not horizontally). To accomplish this, wecreated a short, wide, striped image - 1,200 by 24 pixels - that lookssomething like this (only larger):
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 imagesize is still quite small (25K). Note that the pixel-to-inch ratio isadjustable, and varies from platform to platform; 72 pixels per inch isstandard, 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 InternetExplorer). Only older versions of NCSA Mosaic and the AOL browser willturn down your background image.
yourself.
