Oh, there was a neat way to create a starfield without background images: a dark background and then the content is set in a table with very small cells (where the main content uses colspan and rowspan to get a bigger cell). Some of the small cells can contain stars with transparent gifs. That way, some stars can even blink!

Found an example (though not surrounding content in this case): http://boom.shivas.se/natthimmel/natthimmel.htm