Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Chapter 20. Color and Backgrounds

Once upon a time in 1993, when Mosaic was the only widely distributed browser in town, all web pages had black text on a gray background with blue hyperlinks and purple visited hyperlinks (unless the user changed it in the browser preferences to something more jazzy—say, lime green on purple). Then in 1994, along came Netscape, and HTML extensions for coloring text and backgrounds were born. Even those limited controls came as a welcome relief to web designers and users clamoring for color.

CSS offers control over color and backgrounds that is worlds away from the effects possible with HTML extensions alone. This chapter introduces the properties for adding color and backgrounds to elements listed here.

color	background-position
background-color	background-attachment
background-image	background
background-repeat