Document: body property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The Document.body property represents the <body> or <frameset> node of the current document, or null if no such element exists.

Value

One of the following:

Examples

js
// Given this HTML: <body id="oldBodyElement"></body>
alert(document.body.id); // "oldBodyElement"

const aNewBodyElement = document.createElement("body");

aNewBodyElement.id = "newBodyElement";
document.body = aNewBodyElement;
alert(document.body.id); // "newBodyElement"

Notes

document.body is the element that contains the content for the document. In documents with <body> contents, returns the <body> element, and in frameset documents, this returns the outermost <frameset> element.

Though the body property is settable, setting a new body on a document will effectively remove all the current children of the existing <body> element.

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard
# dom-document-body-dev

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also