Exploring the BODY tag

The BODY tag - Taken from here.

By default, your pages have a white background, black text, and blue links. Here is how to change that.
Below are some of the popular attributes the BODY tag has. Note that each attribute can have many different values.

SELECT ATTRIBUTES FROM THE BODY TAG: bgcolor · text · link · vlink · alink · background · margins

bgcolor
This is the color of the BG, or BackGround, of your page. You need to put the color in as a HEX code, like the rest of these colors. What are HEX codes? Click here. If you want to see a list of HEX codes for 216 different colors, look at this chart. The code is:

bgcolor="#FFFFFF"

Note that, even though the default BG is white, you should still code in #FFFFFF, because older browser's default BG is gray.

text
This will change the color of all the text on your whole page, unless you have changed the color manually (find out how in the text section). Your best bet here is to leave it black, because that's the easiest to read. Code!

text="#000000"

link
Instead of the normal blue, you can now change the color of all your links to something a bit more classy.

link="#FF00FF"

vlink
Links change color once you have clicked on them, from blue to purple. The V stands for 'Visited'. You can change this too, but make sure it is visibly different to the link color, otherwise people will get confused.

vlink="#660066"

alink
When you click on a link, it changes color momentarily, to show you that you've clicked it I guess. If you click the 'Back' button, it is highlighted as being Active so you don't click through on it again. The default is usually red. Make sure you highlight it right; it's a nice feature.

alink="#FF0000"

background
If you want to put an image as your background, use this attribute, and set the value to the same as you would for an image src (This is something we are doing later in the course). You can also link to an image from another site, by giving the entire URL.

background="http://www.yoursite.com/media/BACKGROUND.gif"

Whatever image you choose to use, it will be tiled across your page, filling it up. That means it will repeat itself across your page, so choose one that doesn't look too obvious.
If you want your background to be set in place and not scroll, add the attribute bgproperties="fixed" into the body. This will leave the image as a watermark.

margins
There are two sets of margins on a page, the ones at the sides and the ones at the top and bottom. The two main browsers use different attributes to put in these margins, so when you change one, change the other as well.

* For Internet Explorer: topmargin="0" and leftmargin="0"
* For Netscape: marginheight="0" and marginwidth="0"

Despite this, the units of measurement are the same — pixels, so to make your margins the same in both browsers just set them both to the same value.

Show me the code
So now, a complete body tag would look something like this: