1. Web
  2. HTML
  3. Reference
  4. Elements
  5. <body>

<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, event attributes, and deprecated attributes:

Event attributes

Note: Each of the below event attribute names is linked to its equivalent Window interface event. You can listen to these events using addEventListener() instead of adding the oneventname attribute to the <body> element.

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.

onmessageerror

Function to call when the document has received a message that cannot be deserialized.

onoffline

Function to call when network communication has failed.

ononline

Function to call when network communication has been restored.

onpageswap

Function to call when you navigate across documents, when the previous document is about to unload.

onpagehide

Function to call when the browser hides the current page in the process of presenting a different page from the session's history.

onpagereveal

Function to call when a document is first rendered, either when loading a fresh document from the network or activating a document.

onpageshow

Function to call when the browser displays the window's document due to navigation.

onpopstate

Function to call when the user has navigated session history.

onresize

Function to call when the document has been resized.

onrejectionhandled

Function to call when a JavaScript Promise is handled late.

onstorage

Function to call when the storage area has changed.

onunhandledrejection

Function to call when a JavaScript Promise that has no rejection handler is rejected.

onunload

Function to call when the document is going away.

Deprecated attributes

Warning: Do not use these deprecated attributes; opt for the CSS alternatives listed with each deprecated attribute instead.

Color of text for hyperlinks when selected. Use the CSS color property in conjunction with the :active and :focus pseudo-classes instead.

background

URI of an image to use as a background. Use the CSS background-image property instead.

bgcolor

Background color for the document. Use the CSS background-color property instead.

bottommargin

The margin of the bottom of the body. Use the CSS margin-bottom property (or the logical margin-block-end property) instead.

leftmargin

The margin of the left of the body. Use the CSS margin-left property (or the logical margin-inline-start property) instead.

Color of text for unvisited hypertext links. Use the CSS color property in conjunction with the :link pseudo-class instead.

rightmargin

The margin of the right of the body. Use the CSS margin-right property or the logical margin-inline-end property) instead.

text

Foreground color of text. Use the CSS color property instead.

topmargin

The margin of the top of the body. Use the CSS margin-top property (or the logical margin-block-start property) instead.

Color of text for visited hypertext links. 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

Specifications

Specification
HTML
# the-body-element

Browser compatibility

See also

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