The body tag controls a number of aspects of a page. Namely what the background looks like and the text's color and font.
It can place an image in the background with the background modifier. Use it like so: <body background="background_url">. Pretty simple, eh? Juse use the concepts in the last lesson to enter the background image's url. So if I was using the body tag to define the background on this page, the body tag would look like this: <body background="http://reaperx90.com/background.jpg">. Pretty cool, eh?
Don't want an image as the background, just a color? The bgcolor modifier is for you then. <body bgcolor="red">. That's it. However, only simpler colors work by entering the color's name. Most of the time, you'll need to use the color's hex code. Don't worry, it's easier than it sounds. Just go here:here to see all of the color codes. Use 'em like this: < body bgcolor="#004f37">.
The body tag can also control the color of all of your page's text. The modifier that does it is called text. It's used just like the bgcolor modifier - <body text="#00ff00">. It can also register the names of the simpler colors. There's also the link, alink, and vlink modifiers. These change the colors of links, active links, and visited links respectively. Active links are links that are being clicked on.
All of these modifiers can be used at the same time in the body tag if you want to. Setting a background color and a background image will just make the background the given color until the image loads. Using them all at the same time will look something like this:
<body background="background.jpg" bgcolor="red" text="white" link="blue" alink="green" vlink="gray">.
That's about all you can do with the body tag. Now lets dive into a few tags that are taught here in no particular order for no particular reason.