W3 Validation error - table background image - says no attribute for background

Question

I have lots of errors on our homepage , and I'm working through the list, however there seems to be an issue that is difficult to get around...

I am using this for the doctype:

!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"

Which I believe to be correct, but W3 says that the attribute background doesn't exist although we have used background="/images/blahblah.jpg" all over the site...

Answer 1

The background attribute (for the table element) was an unofficial extension to HTML that never made it into the specification. Use the CSS background-image property instead.

Answer 2

you should use css for styling, eg

style="background: url('...');"

or better yet, use ids/classes and put the styling in an external css files.