[thelist] table background/Netscape/css woes

[Kim Bonfils]

Hi

Thanks to the people in this group, I've finally learned how to make a 
table background work in Netscape (the old nested table ploy).
But my current project involves the Oracle Portal 3.0 portlet technology, 
and that causes some additional problems. This is what I've learned so far:

Oracle generates a bunch of tags that the developer has no control over - 
specifically it adds some styles (including background color) that you 
can't turn off. In effect, a page and a portlet has to have an 
Oracle-generated stylesheet and hence a background color. I can add my own 
stylesheets if I want, but Oracle insists on generating a couple of tags 
using its own styles.

My problem is that I want to use a gif pattern for a background for the 
content area, but I'm stuck inside the following tags that I can't change:

<table class="ORACLE_DEFINED_STYLE">
         <tr>
                 <td class="ORACLE_DEFINED_STYLE">

<!-- My content goes here -->

                 </td>
         </tr>
</table>

Now, inside this structure I can define a background gif for a nested 
table. That works in Explorer. And I can do the double nested table trick 
to make Netscape happy. Except: If I set background="" for the inner table, 
Netscape defaults to the Oracle defined style (so the background becomes 
the color I don't want!). But if I delete the background="" tag, Netscape 
repeats the gif in every cell (exactly the problem the double nested table 
trick is supposed to work around).

Any ideas?
Yes, I've tried defining the correct background as a style, but that 
doesn't seem to help.

Thanks in advance,

Kim Bonfils
http://kim.bonfils.com