The BODY section (which begins with <BODY> and ends with </BODY>) contains the actual visible elements of the page, such as text and images and so on. You can also customise the page by adding parameters to the <BODY> tag - we've talked about this before, mentioning ALINKS and VLINKS and so on. Here's an example of a <BODY> tag with added parameters:
<BODY BGCOLOR="#a0522d" TEXT="black" LINK="#314aff" ALINK="#314aff" VLINK="#9c00ff">
That code is the <BODY> tag for this HTML page you're reading now. I'll explain each added parameter separately:
BGCOLOR="colour" - This tag simply gives the background colour of the webpage.
TEXT="colour" - This tag sets the default colour of all normal (unlinked) text on your page, and borders of unlinked images.
LINK="colour" - This tag sets the default colour of linked text, and the borders of linked images.
ALINK="colour" - This is short for 'Active LINK': this is the colour which a link momentarily changes to *as you click on it*.
VLINK="colour" - This is short for 'Visited LINK': this is the colour of links which have already been visited by your browser.
There is one possible other parameter: the background image parameter. As you know, you can have a tiled image as the background to your page. This is done by adding the parameter BACKGROUND="filename" , like so:
<BODY BGCOLOR="white" TEXT="black" LINK="blue" ALINK="red" VLINK="red" BACKGROUND="universe.jpeg">
NOTE: The background image will always be tiled, not centred or scaled to fit the browser window. Therefore, make sure to choose a background image which will tile seamlessly, not leaving obvious 'joins' between each 'tile'. Also, it is unecessary to specify a background *colour* (BGCOLOR="colour") if you are using a background image, but it perfectly okay to do so. Your background colour will be displayed whilst the background image loads, then will be replaced by the background image.
