This page shows how to use the LivingLinks "backgroundColor" parameter to set a custom color for an applet. As long as the GIF images used by the applet have a transparent background (as these do), you can set the background color of the applet to any color you'd like and that color will appear in the images in place of the transparent color. Of course, you can set the background color regardless of whether or not the images use transparency (useful, for example, when the HEIGHT and WIDTH of the applet are larger than the images used in the animation).

To set the color of the LivingLinks applet background, you can specify a basic color (red, green, blue, black, white, etc.) as follows:

<PARAM NAME=backgroundColor VALUE="white">

However, when you want to use a color that isn't one a basic one, such as the light shade of yellow used in this page, you can supply an exact hexadecimal value instead. In this example, we want the background color of the Web page to "show through" the transparent parts of the animation. And so, the hexadecimal value used to set the Web page background (set with the body bgcolor line at the top of the page -- view the HTML source to see for yourself) is supplied as the value for the "backgroundColor" parameter:

<PARAM NAME=backgroundColor VALUE="FFFFD7">