In his article "HTML's a Tag Too," Bryan Veloso discusses the benefits of applying styles to the <html> element. He argues that by making more effective use of <html>, developers could eliminate the need for a wrapper div. Everything would effectively be "moved up" a level - apply global styles to <html> instead of <body>, and then <body> can serve the same purpose as the wrapper div would have. Bryan points out that this can be particularly handy in XHTML 1.1, in which the <body> no longer stretches the entire length of the page. It's a neat idea, but for many developers - particularly those of us who work on large, enterprise-level sites - it is simply impractical. On large sites, rarely would you want to declare a global background image, for example. Or, you may not be able to access certain elements of a page at all, due to CMS limitations or other restrictions. However, for a small-scale site, styling
<html> could be a good way to reduce divitis, as long as you're mindful of scalability issues.
1. Another cool thing you can do is style the html elements such as giving H1 tags a specific definition. This is good for SEO because they carry more weight. You can use them more frequently if you can make them have the desired look and feel.
Thanks,
Brad Henry
www.seoslap.com
Posted at 1:03PM on Oct 10th 2006 by Brad Henry