Hi:
In order to change the output that you get with ODS HTML and styles.minimal in SAS 8, your best bet is to contact Tech Support for help. First, you have to change styles.minimal template using PROC TEMPLATE syntax. Second, you need to refer to the SAS 8 version of styles.minimal becasue there's a good chance that if anybody used styles.minimal from SAS 9 as a model or test, it wouldn't work in SAS 8 (some Graph style elements were added in SAS 9, so it would be hard for somebody to change the SAS 9 template to work in SAS 8.)
Generally speaking though, you might have to change the background color for various style elements -- CONTAINER, BODY, TABLE, DOCUMENT, HEADER, DATA, etc to a gray color (like cxeeeeee or cxcccccc are light grays) BUT, you may also need to alter the RULES, CELLSPACING and BORDERWIDTH attributes too, in order to achieve the look you want.
Tech Support can help you with the right syntax for SAS 8. For information on how to contact Tech support, refer to:
http://support.sas.com/techsup/contact/index.html
Good luck,
cynthia