Document Colors and Background Images

The HTML 4 and XHTML standards provide a number of attributes for the <body> tag that let you define text, link, and document background colors, in addition to defining an image to be used as the document background. All the popular browsers additionally extend these attributes to include document margins and better background image control. And, of course, the latest stylesheet technologies integrated into the current browsers let you manipulate all of these various display parameters.

Additions and Extensions to the <body> Tag

The attributes that control the document background, text color, and document margins are used with the <body> tag. [<body>, 3.8.1]

The bgcolor attribute

One standard, although deprecated, way you can change the default background color in the browser window to another hue is with the bgcolor attribute for the <body> tag. Like the color attribute for the <font> tag, the required value of the bgcolor attribute may be expressed in either of two ways: as the red, green, and blue (RGB) components of the desired color, or as a standard color name. Appendix G provides a complete discussion of RGB color encoding along with a table of acceptable color names you can use with the bgcolor attribute.

Setting the background color is easy. To get a pure red background using RGB encoding, try: