And if they??™re creating a fixed-width design, large areas of the screen often end up blank.
It??™s for the latter design style that backgrounds can be useful, both in drawing the eye to
the content and providing some visual interest outside of the content area.
Like most things related to design, the use and style of backgrounds is subjective, but
some rules are worth bearing in mind. The most obvious is that a background should not
distract from your content. If you??™re using background images, keep them simple, and
when you??™re using color, ensure that the contrast and saturation with the page??™s background
color is fairly low, but the contrast with the text content over the background is
very high. Also, unless you??™re using a subtle watermark, it??™s generally bad form to put complex
images underneath text (a soft gradient or simple geometric shape can sometimes be
OK, however)??”the low resolution of the Web means it??™s harder to read text than the
Although it??™s possible to set a default size (and other property values) for
text in the body declaration, we??™ll leave that for now, and instead explore
how best to do so in the following chapter.
WEB PAGE ESSENTIALS
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print-based equivalent, and you don??™t want to make this even tougher! Also, because backgrounds
are typically ancillary content, they should not significantly increase the loading
time of the page.
Web page backgrounds in CSS
Backgrounds are added to web page elements using a number of properties, as described
in the sections that follow.
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