Comments on: Styling the html and body Elements

By: Andrew Tetlaw

Andrew Tetlaw — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:11:34 +0000

@IJoeR, it works just fine. In fact you can have a background image on the html element as well (as I mentioned above). I’m not sure what problem you’re hinting at.

By: IJoeR

IJoeR — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:52:10 +0000

so with this technique, what happens if you want to use a background image in the body tag?

I think i like the two div technique better.

By: Meitar

Meitar — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 07:06:56 +0000

Interesting. Thanks for sharing!

Do you have any information on the styling of root elements for XML documents (or “real” XHTML)? I know the W3C recommends not to style the html element, but don’t know if this is so for other markup languages.

By: Flight RisK

Flight RisK — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:48:17 +0000

My first thought on reading this was, “An interesting exploration into the HTML and BODY elements.” But my second reaction was, “Is the HTML element semantically different, from a document POV, such that it shouldn’t be treated the same as body, or, more importantly, the DIV tag?”

By: webringnet.com

webringnet.com — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:26:16 +0000

nice discover. no wonder my visitor complaint my blog about layout position. some say it messy and i encourage them to used firefox

By: Andy Polaine

Andy Polaine — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:18:11 +0000

I quite like the 90s net art of the Safari html element placing.

By: Paul O'B

Paul O'B — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:28:04 +0000

@Andrew, Yes if you centre using the body then the zoom goes wide to the right in IE7 right from the start.

It acts as if the viewport is the left edge of the centred body section and zooms the rest of the page out the right side of the browser.

I’ve always avoided using the body to centre elements because I previously supported ie5.x and if you use the body to centre then it is impossible to centre the page for ie5.x because it doesn’t understand auto margins. It’s not really an issue these days but old habits die hard :)

By: Andrew Tetlaw

Andrew Tetlaw — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:22:17 +0000

@AutisticCuckoo, I never tested zooming, that’s very unfortunate. I’d be a deal-breaker for me too.

By: Koistya `Navin

Koistya `Navin — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:59:15 +0000

I like this approach. Thanks for sharing.

By: Paul O'B

Paul O'B — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:40:40 +0000

The w3c (14.2 background) recommend that for html pages the html element is not styled.

For HTML documents, however, we recommend that authors specify the background for the BODY element rather than the HTML element. For HTML documents whose root HTML element has computed values of ‘transparent’ for ‘background-color’ and ‘none’ for ‘background-image’, user agents must instead use the computed value of those properties from that HTML element’s first BODY element child when painting backgrounds for the canvas, and must not paint a background for that BODY element. Such backgrounds must also be anchored at the same point as they would be if they were painted only for the root element. This does not apply to XHTML documents.

You should only attempt to style the html element in xhtml documents.