I'm helping some friends set up a web site. The general style will have the usual Slashdot-esque announcements going down the center, with buttons on the side to teleport you to various specialized pages. The goal is to have a repeating background image for the center column. There are two obvious solutions, and neither is doing what I want.

Option 1: set up a background image for the center table. However, if the center table is shorter than the stuff around it, I'd really like the image to continue repeating down until the web page would normally end.

Option 2: set up a layer positioned under the center table. If I want the image to repeat in the layer, the best way to do it that I can find is to set it to be a background image for the layer. However, I need to set the layer's height. If I set the height to be some very long number, then it will happily tile the image on down, but the main browser window will make sure that you can scroll down to see the whole frame. This happens even though I have overflow: hidden set on the layer, which I guess makes sense, since it's supposed to be talking about what happens if the stuff inside the layer wants to bust out, not about what happens if the layer, itself, is too big for the page.

The answer must be some variant of the option 2. I guess my question is whether I can, for example, set the layer height to zero and use JavaScript to sniff out the height of the page after it's done laying out, then set the layer's height to match the page.

Edit: So far I've figured out a variant on option 1 that does what I want, but I'd love to know if there's a right way to do this with layers.

Thoughts?