Can I use an image from my local file system as background in HTML?

I've got an HTML document hosted on a remote web server. I'm trying to have one of the elements on the web page use an image file from my local file system as its background image. No luck with Chrome, Safari or Firefox (haven't tried IE).

Here's an example of what I've tried so far.

< !DOCTYPE html > < html > < head > < title >Experiment< /title > < meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" > < style > html,body { width: 100%; height: 100%; } < /style > < /head > < body style="background: url('file:///Users/username/Desktop/background.png')" > < /body >