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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T14:15:22+00:00

Often times I see something like this: <body> <div class=container> </div> </body> Why not

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Often times I see something like this:

<body>
  <div class="container">
  </div>
</body>

Why not just do:

<body class="container">
</body>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You are perfectly free to do any of the following:

    • add a class or id attribute to the body element;
    • directly apply CSS to the body element, with or without class or id attributes; or
    • directly apply CSS to the html element, although without the class or id attributes and with some important caveats.

    Any of these are perfectly legitimate uses of CSS and HTML.

    Why <div id="container"/>? Through the years, many CSS techniques have employed arbitrary container elements for conceptual simplicity, to avoid certain cross-browser inconsistencies or because they were simply too complex to be achieved otherwise. A couple of more subtle reasons include that in older browsers, one could not apply CSS to the html element directly, and there were (and are) certain unusual or restricted properties for those elements—often for obvious reasons. (They were sometimes described as being “magic” for this reason.)

    These all conspired to create a situation where to achieve almost any moderately complex layout, it was inevitably much easier to just start out with a squeaky-clean container element. Though the practice started as a means to an end it soon became just part of the scenery, and now many developers don’t think twice about adding that sprinkling of extra markup.

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