The Document Body

The document body is the meat of the matter. It’s where you put the contents of your document. The beginning <body> and end </body> tags delimit the document body.

The <body> Tag

Within HTML 4 and XHTML, the <body> tag has a number of attributes that control the color and background of your document. Various browsers have extended the tag to give even greater control over your document’s appearance.

<body>

Function

Defines the document body

Attributes

alink, background, bgcolor, bgproperties, class, dir, id, lang, leftmargin, link, onBlur, onClick, onDblClick, onFocus, onKeyDown, onKeyPress, onKeyUp, onLoad, onMouseDown, onMouseMove, onMouseOut, onMouseOver, onMouseUp, onUnload, style, text, title, topmargin, vlink

End tag

</body>; may be omitted in HTML

Contains

body_content

Used in

html_tag

Anything between the beginning <body> and end </body> tags is called body content. The simplest document might have only a sequence of text paragraphs within the <body> tag. More complex documents might include heavily formatted text, graphical figures, tables, and a variety of special effects.

Because the browser can infer the position of the <body> and </body> tags, they can safely be omitted from an HTML, but not an XHTML, document. Like the <html> and <head> tags, we recommend that you include both the <body> and </body> tags in your HTML documents, too, to make them more easily readable and maintainable.

The various attributes for the <body> tag can be loosely grouped ...

Get HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial