
Tiling Images
W
eb designers use the tiling property of background images to create a variety of effects with very low file-size
overhead. The columns typically found on one side of Web pages are a good example of tiling. Columns
are popular because they enable the designer to place navigational buttons in a visual context. An easy way to
create a column that runs the full length of your Web page is to use a long, narrow background image.
In the following figure, the background image is 45 pixels high, 800 pixels wide, and only 6KB in size. When
the browser window is set at 640 × 480 or 800 × 600, the image is tiled down the page to create the verti-
cal column effect. You could just as easily create an image 1,000 pixels high by 40 pixels wide to create a
horizontal column.
When using Cascading Style Sheets to implement your background image, you can control whether the image
tiles horizontally, vertically, in both directions, or not at all.
The second distinguishing feature of background images is that the viewing browser completely fills
either the browser window or the area behind the content of your Web page; whichever is larger.
Suppose you have created a splash page with only a 200 × 200 foreground logo, and you’ve incor-
porated an amazing 1,024 × 768 background that took you weeks to compose. No one can see the
fruits of your labor in the background—un