A Common ApproachSeveral months ago, I received an e-mail from a faithful reader of my business site and weblog, SimpleBits. In the e-mail, the reader explained that while he enjoyed reading the site, he often browses the Web with images turned off, further explaining that he connects to the Internet via a slow dial-up connection and likes to read content rather than waiting for graphics to load. He's not aloneto speed up an otherwise sluggish experience, many users disable images in their browsers, allowing pages to load content and background colors only (Figure 6.1). Figure 6.1. Unchecking the Load Images box in the Firefox browser disables all images.![]() Figure 6.2. The bg.gif image was tiled vertically on top of dark gray to create the columned background of the site.[View full size image] ![]() Figure 6.3. When bg.gif was tiled, it created the white and gray columns that sat behind the page's text content.[View full size image] ![]() The tiled image was assigned to an inner <div> that contained all of the pages' content; therefore, it would lay on top of the gray background behind it, creating the white and gray columns for text. This all works rather nicely. By layering a tiled image on top of a background color, we're creating space for text to be easily read when placed over the tiled image (Figure 6.4). Figure 6.4. The dark gray text sits on top of the tiled image.![]() |