Change $body_classes to $body_attributes [#189358]

The new $body_classes variable is a boon to theme designers. But why limit ourselves to just classes?

In XHTML, there are many possible valid attributes for the body tag, including the extremely powerful id and style attributes among others. The body tag even allows a title attribute.

According to the documentation the $body_classes variable may retrieve something like:

front logged-in node-type-page no-sidebars

which still needs to be surrounded by additional class="" markup before it is of any use in a template.

Instead, $body_attributes could take advantage of drupal_attributes()and return something more flexible and useful like:

class="front logged-in node-type-page no-sidebars" id="nid-457" style="background-image: url(example.jpg)"

I currently implement this method on all of my themes and it is extremely useful, especially for dynamically changing the entire background image for a page.

Comments

Comment #1

Crell commented 5 November 2007 at 06:26

Version:

6.x-dev

» 7.x-dev

I can definitely see how this would be useful, but a more standardized pattern for how classes, styles, and ids should be defined is needed. That should be discussed in more depth here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/6355

This is definitely Drupal 7 material, though.

Comment #2

dvessel commented 2 December 2007 at 19:55

+1 and subscribing

Comment #3

siteograf commented 19 October 2009 at 19:49

It's not good idea to use style attribute in tags - we need to separate content from presentation. And using id attribute in body also not so good practice, because there can be situation when drupal developer need to have both attributes nid and his custom id, but he can't - there can't be more than one id per tag.