HTML Body

The BODY of a document contains the document's content. The content may be presented by a user agent (e.g. a browser) in a variety of ways. For example, for visual browsers, you can think of the BODY as a canvas where the content appears: text, images, colors, graphics, etc. For audio user agents, the same content may be spoken. Since style sheets are now the preferred way to specify a document's presentation, the presentational attributes of BODY have been deprecated.

Both start and end tags for BODY may be omitted. The key attributes are: BACKGROUND, BGCOLOR, TEXT, LINK, VLINK and ALINK. These can be used to set a repeating background image, plus background and foreground colors for normal text and hypertext links.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<Head>
	<TITLE>The WDVL: HTML 3.2</TITLE>
	..  other head elements ..
</Head>
<Body   Background = "/Images/margin.gif"
	Bgcolor	= "#ffffff"
	Text	= "#000000"
	Link	= "blue"
	Vlink	= "purple"
	Alink	= "red"	>

	.. other BODY elements ..
</Body>
</HTML>

The BODY attributes are deprecated in HTML 4.0:

BACKGROUND

This attribute's value is the URI of the graphic that will be tiled as the background of the page. The user will not see this background for non-compliant browsers; if image loading is turned off; or if the user has overridden the background images in their preferences.

This background image is used to tile the full background of the document-viewing area.

If the image you specify as a background has transparent areas, the BGCOLOR will show through (beware, this can show up as black on Macs).

BGCOLOR

This attribute allows you to specify a solid background color. The color is specified using a hexadecimal code:

#RRGGBB

where RR, GG, BB are the hexadecimal digits specifying the Red, Green, and Blue values of the color. For example:

black = #000000
blue = #0000FF
red = #FF0000
orange red = #FF4500
white = #FFFFFF

If a background file specified in the Background attribute cannot be found, the color specified by the BGCOLOR tag will be used. This BGCOLOR will also be used if the user has auto load images off. This BGCOLOR will also be used as a table border color on Netscape for Windows. This attribute sets the color of the background as "#rrggbb" where "#rrggbb" is a hexadecimal red-green-blue triplet.

You need to also control the foreground to establish the proper contrasts. The following attributes are also recognized as part of the BODY tag.

TEXT

This attribute is used to control the color of all the normal text in the document. This basically consists of all text that is not specially colored to indicate a link. The format of TEXT is the same as that of BGCOLOR.

VLINK

Visited link, and ALINK stands for active link. The default coloring of these is: LINK=blue, VLINK=purple, and ALINK=red. Again the format for these attributes is the same as that for BGCOLOR and TEXT.

Colors are given in RGB as hexadecimal numbers (e.g. "#C0FFC0") or as one of 16 widely understood color names: color=aqua> aqua, black, blue, gray, fuchsia, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, yellow. These colors were originally picked as being the standard 16 colors supported with the Windows VGA palette.

Block and Text level elements

Most elements that can appear in the document BODY fall into one of two groups: block level elements which cause paragraph breaks, and text level elements which don't. Note that block elements generally act as containers for text level and other block level elements (excluding headings and address elements), while text level elements can only contain other text level elements. The exact model depends on the element.

Block Level Elements

Common block level elements include

H1 to H6 (headers),
P (paragraphs),
LI (list items), and
HR (horizontal rules).

Text Level Elements

Common text level elements include

EM, I, B and FONT (character emphasis),
A (hypertext links),
BR (line breaks), and
APPLET (embedded objects) and IMG ( Client-side image maps, Server-side image maps )