[Followup Editorial Note: I am leaving this post because it has some thoughts that are useful but I have narrowed this down a little so check my following post before wasting time doing anything without the followup information.]

Strange. I went back and created an "images" folder and tried a background file for the body with your file name and it worked fine for me either way, with or without the "#html," in front of body. The # makes "html" an id name rather than referring to the html in any case and you do not have an id by that name so is it possible you are not ending up with just

body {

at the beginning of the css for the body tag when you change it. Is there a chance you left the "#."

Another possibility just popped into mind and it may be significant. Most people put a div around the entire content of the body element and call that the container or something, then apply these attributes you have applied to the body. The reason is as the w3schools reference states it: All "presentation attributes" of the body element were deprecated in HTML 4.01, and are not supported in XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD. If you fixed your doctype by removing the comment you fixed some problems but it may have disabled most of what you have in the body css because now you are using xhtml where before you only thought you were!

Life gets tedious doesn't it!

I just found another violation of the rules and I do not know what affect it has either to cause problems or to leave things undone. You have some code, including some javascript, in between the head and body. Nothing can be there. To my knowledge everything (particularly your javascript) must be in the head or body except the doctype. Javascript in the head runs as you load the page; javascript in the body operates as called for in the body.

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