MAMA: BODY structure

By Brian Wilson

• Previous article—MAMA: HEAD structure
• Next article—MAMA: Hyperlinks
• Table of contents

Index:

1. Introduction
2. BODY element and attributes
3. Common and proprietary attributes

Introduction

BODY ranks as the 4th most popular element overall. Most people would expect this near-ubiquity, but the opening and closing tags for the BODY element are actually optional. A natural result of relaxed specification requirements is decreased usage, and it is interesting to see the way HTML evolved—some other elements such as LI and P also have closing tags that were optional, and many authors omit closers for them. However, the BODY element has always been treated with a bit more sanctity than the other elements with optional components. Every generic HTML authoring template will include the BODY, and every beginner's class in HTML will admonish its students if they forget to include a BODY element.

BODY element and attributes

Of the URLs that had a BODY element, 799,002 of them (23.14%) did not use any attributes. In the remaining group, two-thirds of the URLs used the Bgcolor attribute.

Marginheight and Marginwidth are attributes that share a similar purpose and will often be used together. The same can also be said of the Link/Text/Vlink/Alink attributes. This explains the proximities of the attributes in the frequency tables. Strangely, this even holds true for totally invalid attributes such as Vspace and Hspace, which have almost identical usage numbers—they are used 4,215 and 4,214 times respectively, and 4,107 of those times are in the same document.

We can compare the overall attribute frequency results to Hickson's Google research and find a high correlation—except for an odd switch. In Hickson's URL set research, the margin appearance attributes (Marginheight/Marginwidth) both have higher frequency than the text and link color appearance attributes (Link/Text/Vlink/Alink). In MAMA's research, the relative popularity of these two groups is reversed; there doesn't seem to be any obvious explanation for the swap.

Common and proprietary attributes

The attribute list for the BODY element above (Fig 2-1) does not include many of the attributes that Hickson's study did, namely all of the generic attributes (Style, Class, Id, Lang and event handlers); those are discussed in other sections. Other semi-popular attributes find a place in this usage list, even though they are not valid by any of the popular markup standards. Attributes such as Ms_positioning and Scroll are MSIE-only browser extensions, while others are created by Web page editors as part of their creation process (such as Nof from Netobjects Fusion and Stylesrc from Microsoft FrontPage).

• Previous article—MAMA: HEAD structure
• Next article—MAMA: Hyperlinks
• Table of contents

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non Commercial - Share Alike 2.5 license.