Netscape, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that universal readership was a stupid goal, content is secondary to appearance, and web authors all have excellent graphic design skills. Admittedly, when used correctly, Netscape's appearance-oriented extensions can give a page a huge boost. But few of us (and certainly not me) have the eye and talent to use them right.
One of the "kiss of death" things for a web page is unreadable text because the author picked some ridiculous combination of background color (or worse, image) and text color. Can you say "Stop" then "Back"?
Black backgrounds seem to be particularly popular, which is terrible because it rarely makes a page look better. Some places have managed to do it right but they are the exception rather than the rule.
Background images are effective when done right, and totally destructive when done wrong. A poorly chosen image can make a page take forever to download (the Stop-Back reflex will kill the page), and if it doesn't tile well, it really looks dumb. An image with both dark and light colors can't make a good background because text will be unreadable on some parts no matter what color you pick.
Page by Ken.