It's true, it's javascript in PHP. I don't know if there's a pure PHP way to do this that might be better. (It's a point representing a player moving across a map.) But what I meant was I used the original code in an html file and it worked just fine but when I made it php so I could access the database, it no longer worked until all these changes were made. Thus the CSS seems much more forgiving in html/javascript than it does in a php file....

This seems to have solved the problem. I needed to give the background a width and height as well as the image in front of it.
Thanks for your help on this. I can't believe how exacting php is. Things that work in javascript are nowhere near working in php. That's at least something I've learned so far.
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thanks for the advice. I changed the id's. Now the background image does not appear at all except for a tiny little square at the upper corner. I can see in that square that it is actually moving, but how do I get it to fill the 300 x 300 pixel space of the dot.gif image which is simply a dot in the middle of a transparent gif. The background image should appear under it.

This is in the body.
This is in the header.
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