Tutorial

How To Style the HTML <body> Element

Updated on August 9, 2021
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By Erin Glass

Senior Manager, DevEd

How To Style the HTML <body> Element

The HTML <body> element is a semantic element that tells the browser that its content is part of the body of the webpage and intended for display. In this tutorial, we will add a <body> element to our web document where we can add content later on.

To add a <body> element to your document, insert opening and closing <body> tags after the closing </head> tag but before the closing </html> tag. Your document should now have the following code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>Sammy’s First Website</title>
  <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/jpg" href=”Favicon_Image_Location”/>
</head>

<body>
</body>

</html>

You should now understand the purpose of an HTML <body> element and understand how to add one to your HTML file.

In the next step, we’ll begin to add our website content in between the <body> tags.

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Tutorial Series: How To Build a Website with HTML

This tutorial series will guide you through creating and further customizing this website using HTML, the standard markup language used to display documents in a web browser. No prior coding experience is necessary but we recommend you start at the beginning of the series if you wish to recreate the demonstration website.

At the end of this series, you should have a website ready to deploy to the cloud and a basic familiarity with HTML. Knowing how to write HTML will provide a strong foundation for learning additional front-end web development skills, such as CSS and JavaScript.

About the authors
Default avatar

Senior Manager, DevEd

Open source advocate and lover of education, culture, and community.

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