ah background-image:url .... thats what i was looking for.

so it looks as if its basically the same, except you add "style" and different syntax.
If you ask me it seems pointless to have to do this with css to be valid..... its like the same thing, but with extra crap.

HTML was never meant to be presentational, it was added because it became mainstream overnight and later CSS was created, which was what was needed in the first place. I learned to write HTML only using standards and had to make it look good in a text only browser for the class I was taking. I also had to take accessibility into account, while creating a PHP and MySQL based project that would be heavy traffic (such as a shop, or a forum) that had input and output and had to stand up against sql injection and XSS and a medial level.
I think having the bgcolor attribute is pointless.

why is bgcolor pointless? how would you color a background then?

iys alot more confusing to do tables and stuff, and i gotta be honest, I have the utmost respect for those who can code in something like notepad, with no visual display of where anything is.

trying to get divs to be in the right spot, or even regular tables sometimes, makes me want to pull my hair out.
then when you do get it just right, you make one small change and it throws the whole thing out of whack again.

blows my mind man.... strangely enough though, I really like vbulletin, and find it easy to play with, even though its a combo of CSS/MySQL/PHP/XHTML and their own odd little scripting language.

now im having one other small problem.
There is a white border thats surrounding the whole thing.... if you look at the right side, you will see that the table/border is off about 1 pixel from being right up against the side of the images, like it is on the lefthand side.

I cant seem to get it right, and get it to line up properly.... any ideas on that one?

alright now all its doing is just throwing everything out of alignment....and this is where i start to get frustrated.... the page looked fine, but it had to be made valid, and now the validator doesnt shut up about these stupid errors, when i fix them, it makes me page look like ****..... what am i doing wrong here?

To set a background-color you use, well, background-color (or just background). As for the display problem, I'm looking into it, but you may wish to post in the CSS forum about this.

css problem then is it?

I've reverted it a little bit, and im going to try and knock out the small bugs, while keeping the page looking...... as "good" as it does now.... the alignment problem as it turns out should have the left border of the table, being 1pixel away from everything else as well.... so its the left side thats messed up not the right side.

If you look at the page now, the right border is sitting away from everything else.... look in th bottom right corner and you will see it doesn't look like its connected.

I would be happy with either:
both borders sitting against everything else with no space
OR
both borders sitting AWAY from everything else 1 pixel, as it is originally.

Here is the original template.
www.teamspeakdisplay.com/orig.html

It's definitely CSS, but I'm having trouble figuring out just what it is.

I made a post in the CSS forum.
I think making the right side border sit against the content would look better than the original, which has both left and right side borders sitting away from the content area.

Imdown to 5 errors now.... not to bad from the anywhere from 33 to 235 errors I was getting depending on the doctype

no insight to this one yet?

Ive also noticed that the entire page isnt centered in firefox 3 (I dont know about previous versions... ive never used FF before)