The Body Element and Related Elements

The BODY element

Within the BODY element, you can structure text into paragraphs, and lists, as well as highlighting phrases and creating links, amongst other things. The BODY element has the following attributes, all of which are optional:

Note that the ID, LANG and CLASS attributes can be used with virtually all of the elements permitted in the document body.

ID

An SGML identifier used as the target for hypertext links or for naming particular elements in associated style sheets. Identifiers are NAME tokens and must be unique within the scope of the current document.

LANG

This is one of the ISO standard language abbreviations, e.g. "en.uk" for the variation of English spoken in the United Kingdom. It can be used by parsers to select language specific choices for quotation marks, ligatures and hypenation rules etc. The language attribute is composed from the two letter language code from ISO 639, optionally followed by a period and a two letter country code from ISO 3166.

CLASS

This a space separated list of SGML NAME tokens and is used to subclass tag names. For instance, <P CLASS=STANZA.COUPLET> defines a paragraph that acts as a couplet in a stanza. By convention, the class names are interpreted hierarchically, with the most general class on the left and the most specific on the right, where classes are separated by a period. The CLASS attribute is most commonly used to attach a different style to some element, but it is recommended that where practical class names should be picked on the basis of the element's semantics, as this will permit other uses, such as restricting search through documents by matching on element class names. The conventions for choosing class names are outside the scope of this specification.

BACKGROUND

This can be used to specify a URI for an image tile to cover the document background. This provides a way of giving a group of documents a distinctive appearence. Clients may ignore this attribute. It is included here for the benefit of clients that don't support style sheets. Note that the text color may need to be adjusted to show an adequate contrast with the background.

Note that you don't need to include a BODY tag unless you want to specify one of the above attributes.

Body Structure

The document body is composed from zero or more of the following elements:

• DIV - used for hierarchical containers and static banners
• Headings (H1, to H6) - a set of headers of varying levels of importance
• Block elements - paragraphs, lists, forms, tables, figures and other elements
• Horizontal rules, and the ADDRESS element
• Text and character level markup including emphasis, images, math, hypertext links and miscellaneous elements.

Note that text and character level markup are only permitted at this level for backwards compatibility with legacy documents. The HTML.Recommended flag enforces a more structured approach to authoring HTML documents.