Question

When I declare some base styles for my site I have used to do that on the body tag. Like for example

body {
  font-size: medium;
  line-height: 1.3em;
}

But I have also seen people do things like that on the html tag. And on both. Where should it be done? Should some be at one and some at the other? Should all be on one of them? Or does it simply not matter at all? Or?

Answer 1

I like applying base declarations to html. Most of the time, I use body as a container, like so:

html {
 /* Base styles go here */
 font: 14px/1.5 Arial, sans-serif;
 background: darkgreen;
}

body {
 background: lightgreen;
 padding: 0 20px;
 width: 920px;
 margin: 0 auto;
}

View the demo: http://jsbin.com/atiso3

Most people tend to use additional DIVs just to accomplish this basic behavior. It’s not necessary when you know how to use html and body in CSS 😉