<body>: The Document Body element

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The <body> HTML element represents the content of an HTML document. There can be only one <body> element in a document.

Attributes

This element includes the global attributes.

alink Deprecated: Color of text for hyperlinks when selected. Do not use this attribute! Use the CSS color property in conjunction with the :active pseudo-class instead.
background Deprecated: URI of an image to use as a background. Do not use this attribute! Use the CSS background property on the element instead.
bgcolor Deprecated: Background color for the document. Do not use this attribute! Use the CSS background-color property on the element instead.
bottommargin Deprecated: The margin of the bottom of the body. Do not use this attribute! Use the CSS margin-bottom property on the element instead.
leftmargin Deprecated: The margin of the left of the body. Do not use this attribute! Use the CSS margin-left property on the element instead.
link Deprecated: Color of text for unvisited hypertext links. Do not use this attribute! Use the CSS color property in conjunction with the :link pseudo-class instead.
onafterprint: Function to call after the user has printed the document.
onbeforeprint: Function to call when the user requests printing of the document.
onbeforeunload: Function to call when the document is about to be unloaded.
onblur: Function to call when the document loses focus.
onerror: Function to call when the document fails to load properly.
onfocus: Function to call when the document receives focus.
onhashchange: Function to call when the fragment identifier part (starting with the hash ('#') character) of the document's current address has changed.
onlanguagechange: Function to call when the preferred languages changed.
onload: Function to call when the document has finished loading.
onmessage: Function to call when the document has received a message.
onoffline: Function to call when network communication has failed.
ononline: Function to call when network communication has been restored.
onpopstate: Function to call when the user has navigated session history.
onresize: Function to call when the document has been resized.
onstorage: Function to call when the storage area has changed.
onunload: Function to call when the document is going away.
rightmargin Deprecated: The margin of the right of the body. Do not use this attribute! Use the CSS margin-right property on the element instead.
text Deprecated: Foreground color of text. Do not use this attribute! Use CSS color property on the element instead.
topmargin Deprecated: The margin of the top of the body. Do not use this attribute! Use the CSS margin-top property on the element instead.
vlink Deprecated: Color of text for visited hypertext links. Do not use this attribute! Use the CSS color property in conjunction with the :visited pseudo-class instead.

Examples

html

<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>Document title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>
      The <code>&lt;body&gt;</code> HTML element represents the content of an
      HTML document. There can be only one <code>&lt;body&gt;</code> element in
      a document.
    </p>
  </body>
</html>

Result

Technical summary

Content categories	None.
Permitted content	Flow content.
Tag omission	The start tag may be omitted if the first thing inside it is not a space character, comment, `<script>` element or `<style>` element. The end tag may be omitted if the `<body>` element has contents or has a start tag, and is not immediately followed by a comment.
Permitted parents	It must be the second element of an `<html>` element.
Implicit ARIA role	`generic`
Permitted ARIA roles	No `role` permitted
DOM interface	`HTMLBodyElement` The `<body>` element exposes the `HTMLBodyElement` interface. You can access the `<body>` element through the `document.body` property.

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard # the-body-element

Browser compatibility