HTML 5 <body> Tag

The HTML <body> tag is used for indicating the main content section of the HTML document. The body tag is placed between the </head> and the </html> tags.

Note that the attributes for the body tag are no longer supported in HTML (these were previously specified as deprecated in HTML 4.01). You should now use CSS for defining the presentation of your document body. For example, see CSS background-color and CSS text-decoration.

Demo

Attributes

HTML tags can contain one or more attributes. Attributes are added to a tag to provide the browser with more information about how the tag should appear or behave. Attributes consist of a name and a value separated by an equals (=) sign, with the value surrounded by double quotes. Here's an example, style="color:black;".

There are 3 kinds of attributes that you can add to your HTML tags: Element-specific, global, and event handler content attributes.

The attributes that you can add to this tag are listed below.

Element-Specific Attributes

The following table shows the attributes that are specific to this tag/element.

HTML5 introduced the following event handlers that can be used with the <body> element (and the <frameset> element in HTML 4 and earlier).

AttributeDescription
onafterprintThe afterprint event handler
onbeforeprintThe beforeprint event handler
onbeforeunloadThe beforeunload event handler
onhashchangeThe hashchange event handler
onmessageThe message event handler
onofflineThe offline event handler
ononlineThe online event handler
onpagehideThe pagehide event handler
onpageshowThe pageshow event handler
onpopstateThe popstate event handler
onstorageThe storage event handler
onunloadThe unload event handler

Global Attributes

The following attributes are standard across all HTML 5 tags (although the tabindex attribute does not apply to dialog elements).

For a full explanation of these attributes, see HTML 5 global attributes.

Event Handler Content Attributes

Event handler content attributes enable you to invoke a script from within your HTML. The script is invoked when a certain "event" occurs. Each event handler content attribute deals with a different event.

For a full list of event handlers, see HTML 5 event handler content attributes.