[whatwg] Background of <body> covering the whole page – is this described somewhere?

Tue Jul 23 14:15:27 PDT 2013

On Tue, 23 Jul 2013, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> 2013-07-23 20:44, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:37 AM, Jukka K. Korpela 
> > <jkorpela at cs.tut.fi> wrote:
> > > Is this described somewhere in HTML or CSS specifications or drafts? 
> > > I think it should be, since it is what browsers do (tested on 
> > > Firefox, Chrome, IE), and even though it sounds absurd, I’m afraid 
> > > pages may rely on it. A natural place to look at is 
> > > http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/rendering.html#the-page 
> > > but I can’t find any statement about the body element extending to 
> > > cover the viewport as far as backgrounds are considered.
> > 
> > http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/colors.html#background
> 
> Thanks for the prompt reply. Makes things clear. On the practical side, 
> however, I wonder whether this part of CSS specifications should be 
> referred to in the Rendering section, as it is logically rather 
> unexpected.

There's a lot of these kinds of things (e.g. lots of things are dependent 
on quirks mode, there's a bunch more like the background that are 
dependent on the MIME type, etc). Short of duplicating the entire CSS spec 
in the HTML spec (which would be my preference, modulo logistics around 
editing -- I think we should just have one "Web" spec), it seems 
impractical to actually mention all of them in the HTML spec. This is why 
we don't list them currently.

-- 
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