[thelist] Non-websafe colors vs. GIF bg's

[nate beaty]

Hello everyone,

New to the list.. My first plea for help concerns a site I'm developing 
with a graphics-intensive design that uses a dreadful assortment of 
nested tables (I bet I've lost a good portion of you already).

My question is about using background colors (for the body & tables) 
that are outside the websafe palette.  Currently I'm using small GIF 
patches instead of, say, bgcolor="#0D8483" attributes.   But I've 
started noticing some strange behavior in certain browsers, especially 
when there are multiple nested tables, all with repeating GIF 
backgrounds.

Though I don't really know how the browsers are rendering this, I sense 
that it's a dumb thing to do.

I'm wondering how bad of an idea it is to use non-websave colors as 
backgrounds (instead of using GIFs), how well they display on all 
browsers  (assuming users have their color depth above 256), and if 
using CSS would be a better idea.. ?

My client expects the design to display normally on Netscape 4.x (ugh) 
-- There's an image of the design up at 
http://brainfag.com/image/topshelf.jpg -- If it would be more helpful 
to have an actual page online, I can do that (I didn't feel comfortable 
linking to the site-in-development).

Any help would be immensely appreciated.  Thanks in advance..

Nate.