Answer: Well, There is only one way to do that without as far as I know, but unfortunately you can't have your cake and eat it too.

You must create an image and set it as a background image in the table. You can't get it *all* web safe. Gradients have so many different colors, even when they are just one or two colors. You can start the gradient with two web safe colors, but they probably will be only safe on the ends. I created a gradient for a client and in AOL, normally blues, ended up with neon green running through it.

If you try in PhotoShop to do a normal black and white gradient, then turn it to index colors using *Web* you will see it goes from hundreds of greys to four shades of grey, and then the black and white on the ends.

To be honest, most people with browsers that could even see your background, most likely would have a monitor that would be able to see the gradient with all of its colors. If people are using 16 bit or higher, they should be able to see the gradient without any problems. So unless your users are in the dark ages, you should be able to use a normal .jpg or .gif direct from PhotoShop.

To set a table image as the background, you would have a td tag like this: <TD background="images\yellow2dot.gif" bgcolor="#ffffcc"> I usually set the bg color to be similar to the image, so it let's people know there will be something coming, or perhaps so they can read the text if it would be impossible to read without the image that is to be loaded.

If you look at the code at this page I used imbedded tables to be able to type in the center of the circle. Only the newer versions of IE and Netscape can view table backgrounds, and give up on trying to make it work in forms. Table backgrounds show up great on forms in IE, but not in Netscape.

You can go to http://www.phoenix.net/~jacobson/pages/colorSel.html to get the hex on the web safe colors, and if you need to convert them for RGB, you can go to http://www.phoenix.net/~jacobson/pages/hex.html#DectoHex to convert them. Again, you can just pick two web safe colors, so they can match your background or text perfectly, and just make a gradient with those two colors. 98% of the people should see it just fine....but remember, gradients can be large in file size!