Re: textured backgrounds

Eric Bina (ebina@storm.mcom.com)
Wed, 18 Jan 95 05:28:37 EST

Suggestions such as:
> <LINK REL=BACKGROUND-IMAGE SRC="http://www.foo.com/allwhite.pbf">

I was more concerned with what people thought of the idea as opposed to
arguments over the syntax of its implementation, but...

I originally thought something like:

<BACKGROUND HREF="backgrounds/arena_paper.gif">
or
<BACKGROUND RGB="#FFFFFF">
in the case of both an RGB and an HREF attribute being present you could
either have the image override the color, or if the image is a transparent
GIF have the RGB color show through.

Then, thinking more I thought, if they can set the background, they also need
to be able to set the text color to ensure legible contrast.

<FOREGROUND RGB="#000000">
springs to mind, but what about anchor text, visited anchors, active anchors?
Should these all be derived by the browser based on text color, or do we have
a monster like?
<FOREGROUND TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000FF" VLINK="#AA00AA" ALINK="#FF0000">

If all the link colors are just browser derived from text color we have
few enough attributes to combine and get

<tag_name_here BACKGROUND="#FFFFFF" FOREGROUND="#000000" HREF="background.gif">

Heck even with all the different color attributes you can still do one
monster tag. Say lavender text floating above a space backdrop with yellow
anchors (gray when visited, white when activated).

<PAPER BACKGROUND="#000000" HREF="space.gif" FOREGROUND="#CC00FF"
LINK="#FFFF00" VLINK="#CCCCCC" ALINK="FFFFFF">

Anyways, the idea seemed cool enough for us to discuss its merits.
At the moment I guess I favor all attributes in one big tag like my last
example. I'm not so keen on packing them in the LINK tag because if you
are just specifying white text on black background there is no link involved.

Eric