Styling the `<html>` element in CSS?
Can anyone explain to me why can we style the element html?
What are differences between it and body?
I usually see tutorials and multiple websites using body and never html, I only found about it when using YUI 3: CSS Reset since changing the background in body didn't work.
Edit: Actually, I still haven't found the problem regarding that, when I add the reset.css the background gets white, when I remove it returns to normal. Yet Chrome inspector says that the background is the normal one. Btw, this is getting off topic. :p
Edit 2: The culprit was the doctype. Somehow it made the html style in the css-reset render after the body style in my stylesheet. Maybe I should open a question regarding this.
Doctype: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
Answer
Quite often you'll find people styling the HTML element since it does have an affect on the way the page is rendered.
The most notable style you're likely to see is
html,body{
min-height:101%;
}
This is used to ensure that the scroll bars in browsers like Firefox, always show on the page. This stops the page shifting left and right when changing between long and short pages.