I came upon a situation today where I had two different images I wanted to use for my background.

The first was a gradient, with a grid-line pattern overlayed.  Normally I would  just make the background color match the ending color of the gradient and problem solved.  But in this case I have the gridlines suddenly stopping on long pages.

I could have just made an extremely "tall" image, but that would be unreasonable and inflexible, since page height has no limit.

Instead, what I wanted to do is have another image that I could tile which has the same pattern as the gradient background, but was just a solid color, matching the end of the gradient.

To solve this problem, I set the background of the HTML element to be the solid-colored image and set the background of the BODY element to be the gradient.  Be sure to leave the background color of the BODY blank, or it will cover the HTML background.

Here is the code:

html
{
    background: #003366 url('background2.gif') repeat;
}



body
{
    background-image:    url('background1.jpg');
    background-position: top left;
    background-repeat:   repeat-x;
}

Not that I don’t have confidence in my abilities, but I didn’t think I’d get them to the top spot! 

Dadanco, a Joint Venture with Mestek, is a supplier of Active Chilled Beams, an energy efficient method of delivering cool air.  They have other similar products that use induced secondary air to help increase the efficiency and comfort of traditional "all air" systems.  It’s pretty neat, even though I don’t fully understand it all.

So where am I going with all of this?  As the webmaster for Mestek, Inc.  I created the website for Dadanco from the ground up, and went back a few times to optimize the site for search engines.  I just followed all that I had read and heard about, and filled in the blanks with intuition.  All that work has payed off, and they hit Google’s numer 1 spot for the keyword they were most interested in.  Granted, there were a lot of contributing factors, but I had encouraged them all, if not done them myself.

Hopefully now I can keep them there!

Yet again IE sends me on a wild goose chase. 

I had just added a video using Jeroenwijering‘s Media Player, and all of a sudden I was getting an error from IE saying "Internet Explorer Cannot Open the Internet Site". 

After a little digging, I found out that this is caused by a parsing error involving javascript in the body acting on an object in the body, or something similar to that. 

The solutions were to move the script to the beginning or end of the body tag, or outside of it all together, which didn’t work that well for me, or to add defer="defer" to the script tag.  I liked that option, and apparently so did IE.  Problem solved and now I can get on with my life again. 

[EDIT]

I think you must also make sure the script is not contained in the object that it is modifying.  For instance, my script was rewriting the contents of a DIV.  I had the script inside that DIV and even with the defer flag set, it was getting errors.  Once I moved the script outside, it seemed to work fine.