Missing or presenting body-tag placeholder in SXA

Question

I have got two sample websites, both just have created tenant and site with SXA 1.8. When I am creating a page and open it in EE, I am getting two different visual editing structures.

1. Three placeholders (header, main, footer) taking a central part of a page. Same as shown in numerous demos:

2. Four placeholders taking entire width of a page: body-top following by those 3 mentioned above: header, main, footer

I am wondering in a reason for such a misconsistency, trying to identify the difference, however, nothing found.

• These both pages have Page template inheriting the same exact set of base templates (all from SXA)
• These both pages have Page template inheriting the same exact set of base templates (all coming from SXA)
• I also checked Standard Values item for that template and both look identical.
• Actual Page items I am opening in EE, that has derived from Page templates also are similar - no fields differenced at least.
• Final Layouts are the same, no controls, both using MVC Layout view coming with SXA out of the box.
• Still compared both layout files (/Views/SxaLayout/SxaLayout.cshtml) to confirm they match byte-to-byte, both have the structure described in the official SXA documentation (https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/sxa/17/sitecore-experience-accelerator/en/the-html-structure-of-pages-and-renderings.html). Yes, they both have body-top placeholder within layout (and also body-bottom which I am not seeing in both cases for some reason), as described in the doc.

Opening DevTool is browser gave me the difference, explaining why one is shown but not another:

<code type="text/sitecore" id="scEnclosingTag_" chrometype="placeholder" kind="close" hintname="body-top" class="scpm">
</code>

vs.

<code type="text/sitecore" chrometype="placeholder" kind="open" id="body_top" key="body-top" class="scpm" data-selectable="true">
... large json data inside...
</code>

Therefore the question is: why is the behaviour different and how to make it consistent (to either of layouts or the "right" one)? How do I control this behaviour?

Answer 1

Seems that the poster has solved the issue by now and posted about this in his Blog: http://blog.martinmiles.net/post/mythical-sxa-body-top-placeholder

Answer 2

As mentioned in my comment under Patric's post, I did not come to a precise answer on what exactly is breaking, however after spending decent time I have identified that Themes for that SXA website is breaking out, so had to replace it entirely (from my blog post):

Finally, after spending plenty of time I figured out that something was wrong with SXA themes. Unfortunately, did not identify what exactly causes the problem, but after re-creating it at serialization config and re-serializing items the issue has gone. So, the outcome is: if you see unexpected placeholders - please make sure your SXA theme is in the correct state and serialized properly.

More info if the issue and how I troubleshooted it: http://blog.martinmiles.net/post/mythical-sxa-body-top-placeholder