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LESSON
4
Addresses and Background Images




I know I said we would learn tables next, but I felt a need to talk about Addresses and Background Image's . I promise we'll do tables next!

ADDRESSES

You learned in Lesson 3 of this lesson about Image and Link tags and how they asked for an Address inside the quote marks. An Address is the location of a file, either on the internet, or in your computer. Lets talk about the computer first. On my hard drive (which is my "C" drive and is referred to as C: ), I have a folder called My Documents , inside that folder I have a folder called WebPages , Inside the WebPages folder I keep separate folders for each one of my web pages. One of these folders is called webhelp , inside that folder I keep all of the .html files for these lessons and any other files that go with them. So the Address to this page on my computer is:

C:\My Documents\WebPages\lessons\less3.asp

NOTE: the direction of the slant of the slash is different than the one you use for the internet!

Now lets talk about the internet. The Address to this page on the internet is:

http://www.htmljunction.com.com/lessons/less3.asp

The http:// stands for H yper T ext T ransfer P rotocol (For a more detailed explaination see one of the resources on the left side of this page), It is basicaly saying to look on the Internet for the following directory. On the internet somewhere is a directory called (for ease of explaining) www.htmljunction.com and is known as the Root or Top directory. Inside that directory I have one called webhelp inside that directory is where I keep the file for this page!

NOTE: A Folder and Directory are the same thing ! On the computer it is referred to as a Folder and on the Internet as a Directory

On the Internet the Address can be shortened, If the file is in a different directory, the address can be shortened to:
/images/bye[1].gif
If I'm placing an image on a page and both the html and image files are in the same directory then it can be shortened to just this:
bye[1].gif

Remember if the page or image is not on your website the whole address must be included. Including the http://

NOTE: You cannot use an address for your computer on the Internet and vice versa

BACKGROUND IMAGES

Now that you know about addresses and how to place images and links, and you know about the body tag, you can now use an image as a background!

Using the body tag from the Test Page we will insert the command: background="" , so that it looks like this:

<body background="bye(1).gif" bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000ff" vlink="#800080" alink="#ff0000">

What this command is saying is: Use the image located at the address inside the " " quote marks as a background on this page.
There are a few things to note here. One being the address I used for the image, the image is in the same directory as the html file so I shortened it. If you are having problems, use the whole address. The second thing to note is that I left in the bgcolor="" command. That is so the bgcolor command will take over if you have problems loading the image. The last thing to note here is when you use an image for a background it will tile it, like this Annoying Background , of course you probably wouldnt use that background but you can see what tiling does!

There is another command that you can put in the body tag that is kinda cool and thats the bgproperties="fixed" command, that will give you a fixed background so that it will not scroll with the rest of the page. I am told that command only works with Internet Explorer and not with Netscape.

NOTE: The commands do not have to be in any particular order, just make sure the word body is first in the tag, and that the commands are separated by spaces.(this is true for all tags)

Ok, now that thats done with, I promise we will look at Tables next.