The Body
The <body> is where the bulk of your web page is. Almost everything
you've seen on web pages is done in between two body tags. But there are
also a few things that are set within the actual <body> tag. You'll
see what I mean in a little bit. Within the <body> tag you can set the
background picture, background color, text color, link color, visited link
color, and active link color. The background picture is
background="filename.gif". The background color is bgcolor="white".
The text color is text="black". The link color is link="blue". The
visted link color is vlink="green". The active link color is
alink="red". The background picture is any picture that you want to
be loaded behind the text. You can only have one picture, and it will
repeat. Be sure that the text color you choose contrasts with the
picture, or the text will be unreadable. The background color is used
if you do not wish to put a picture in the background. The text color
is the color of the words on that particular document. The link color
is the color of the words that are links. The visited link color is
the color that links turn if you've already visited a particular site.
The active link color is the color that the link turns when you click
on a link. If you click on a link really fast, it will (if alink
isn't the same as link or vlink) flash another color. To test what
the alink color is, click and hold on a link.
Color can also be set using the RGB code. The code is in hexadecimal
format. So, black would be #000000. White would be #FFFFFF. Red would
be #FF0000. Green would be #00FF00. Blue would be #0000FF. The code is
a six digit number. The first two digits are the red value. The seconde
two digits are the green value. The last two digits are the blue value.
Confused? Try
this.
So, if you want a page with a white background, black text, blue links,
green visited links, and red active links, you'd put
<body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="blue" vlink="green"
alink="red"> and to end it, </body>. So everything between those two
tags would recieve the properties of the first tag. An equivalent would
be <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" link="#0000FF"
vlink="#00FF00" alink="#FF0000">. If you wanted a picture in the
background, you'd remove the bgcolor="white" and add
background="filename.jpg". So a file with the htmlcolor.gif picture as a
background, and all other properties the same, would be <body
background="htmlcolor.gif" text="black" link="blue" vlink="green"
alink="red">. Want to see this in action? Click
here. If you clicked
on that link, you'd notice how busy it appears, and how hard it is to
read the text. So try to keep that in mind. Don't use images that
are too busy.
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