3.8 The Document Body
The document body is the meat of the matter; it's
where you put the contents of your document. The
<body> tag delimits the document body.
3.8.1 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 ( ![]() onBlur, onClick, onDblClick, onFocus, onKeyDown, onKeyPress, onKeyUp, onLoad, onMouseDown, onMouseMove, onMouseOut, onMouseOver, onMouseUp, onUnload, style, text, title, topmargin ( ![]() End tag </body>; may be omitted in HTML Contains body_content Used in html_tag |
ending counterpart, </body>, 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.
Since the position of the <body> and
</body> tags can be inferred by the browser,
they can safely be omitted from an HTML, but not an XHTML, document.
Like the <html> and
<head> tags, we recommend that you include
the <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 into three
sets: those that give you some control over the
document's appearance, those that associate
programmable functions with the document itself, and those that label
and identify the body for later reference. We address the appearance
attributes (alink, background,
bgcolor, bgproperties,
leftmargin, link,
text, topmargin, and
vlink) in Chapter 5; the
class and style attributes for
cascading style sheets in Chapter 8; JavaScript
style sheets and the programmatic attributes (the
"on-event" ones) in Chapter 12; the language attributes
(dir and lang) earlier in this
chapter, in Section 3.6.1.1 and Section 3.6.1.2; and the identification
attributes (id and title) in
Chapter 4. [Section 3.6.1.1] [Section 3.6.1.2] [Section 4.1.1.4] [Section 4.1.1.5]
3.8.2 Frames
The HTML and XHTML standards define a special type of document in
which you replace the <body> tag with one or
more <frameset>
tags. This so-called frame document divides the
display window into one or more independent windows, each displaying
a different document. We thoroughly describe this innovation in Chapter 11.