Just looking at some CSS here, and I noticed:
.head{position:relative;overflow:hidden;margin:-30px 0 0 -25px;width:820px;padding:20px 25px 0 25px;background:url(/images/bkg.gif) 0 0 no-repeat;}
Why would you put -30 and -25px margins?
I started typing an answer, and then found a much better one here (Wayback Machine backup). Some salient points:
Negative margins:
are valid CSS
don't break page flow
have high levels of cross-browser compatibility (although if they break your link or floated image, then try adding position: relative; that should fix it)
Their effect on unfloated elements:
applying them to the top or left of an element "pulls" that element in the appropriate direction(s)
HOWEVER, applying them to the bottom or right of an element "pulls" immediately subsequent elements into them, making them overlap
Their effect on floated elements:
this is more complex and I can't summarise it better than the article. Have a play around in Firebug to get a feel for them.
There are some brilliant examples of negative margin use in that article (especially the 3-column layout! Magic. I've used a similar technique for page layout before.) The most common use for them I've found is just to move an element a small amount to correct its position, and to make one element overlap another for visual effect.
A lot of tricks and nice effects use negative margins:
Image Replacement Trick - when you want to use that particular font and you just can't tear away from it, image replacement is the trick. Uses negative margins to push out the regular font and replace it with the "picture" font.
Image Rollovers with borders - giving a negative margin to the image the same size in pixels as the border size will keep the image, and therefore the layout, from shifting on a rollover.
Center screen positioning - using negative margins the same dimension as the height and width of the object you want to center, you can center an object in the middle of the browser.
Negative margins can be helpful when you have other element "around" that you want to e.g. have a padding for all other elements. I use it very often, read here, why:
http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2005/05/23/negative.html
Actually i think there is an use case where negative margins are the only right thing to do:
You want an part of a box to extend over the whole parent, even over the padding. So instead of removing the padding of the parent element an apply it to all children exept for your special case, you give your special case a negative margin. Also no haggling with positioning. Works great and is very readable.
Example: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/DpHvu
Related
I have been searching for an answer to this for some time.
i want to add space to the bottom of my web page, as content sits too close to edge.
I have tied 'padding-bottom' in wrapper tag, in body tag and in style tag.. not working.
any help on this appreciated..
thanks,
Keith.
http://www.reddogonline.eu/av.html
you have a serious design problem.
all your elements are relatively position with top offset, that cause the wrapper and body to be actually smaller then you think. because this offset is not taken in consideration when determining the wrapper height. (so the height of the wrapper is only the sum of his children height, without the offset between them)
when you add padding-bottom to the wrapper or the body, it works (of course), but you don't see it. because your elements overlaps the wrapper..
you will be able to see that I'm right by setting overflow:hidden; to the wrapper (or inspecting your site with a tool). suddenly, half of your content disappears..
you need to remove the position:relative; from your elements, and use margin-top instead of top to make the desired space between the elements.
That way: the wrapper and body height will be set right, and the padding will work as you expect it.
You're positioning relatively all your elements. That's causing the padding/margin problems too. Why would you position your elements like this?
Try removing relative positioning and add top/bottom margins to your elements. The results will be the same in terms of visual effect.
It will also be much simpler adding new sound boxes, as you don't have to calculate a top positioning for each one.
Kind of hard to put into words, so here's the jsFiddle showing it.
When hovering over one of the green blocks, I wanted its background to expand enough that it "touches" the contiguous rectangles (it overlaps their margins). However, when hovering over the last block of each line, the layout goes wild: the line below only shows one element, etc.
The cause seems to stem from the negative margin; since, if the margin for the "expanded" class is set to plain 0 instead of -5, this problem doesn't happen. But of course this would leave a space between blocks.
The size of the parent container doesn't seem to alter this. Note that for now I'm not particularly concerned about the fact that the expanded block isn't well centered and makes the others in its line wobble a bit, although it may be linked to the problem.
Change de padding of the extended into 10px
http://jsfiddle.net/TMXLz/4/
The only way I can see to do what you want is to position each of those blocks absolutely (position:absolute) into the place you want them. You're main issue here is that the changes you want to make to the box are going to cause them to encroach on each others space. So you either need to adjust all their spacing (using js) on each mouseover (which sucks). Or absolutely position the items into place (specific positioning style for each box) then you won't have an issue with them overlapping partially. Just be sure to increase the active ones z-index so its always 'over' the others.
This may be the output you are looking for
http://jsfiddle.net/TMXLz/5/
Whenever i use a large line-height like 1.6em it always adds a margin in the very top of the text which i don't want.
Example: http://jsfiddle.net/EstpJ/1/
i want the text to be sharply lined with the borders and not have any kind of top or bottom margin.
How to fix that?
That's exactly what line-height is, it's a manual way to set the height of a line of text for the purposes of wrapping text and such. The actual visible size is determined by the font-size and to a lesser extend by the font-family. The average line-height for normal text/font is around 1.2em. Anything larger than that will cause visible letterboxing, which is exactly what you are describing. Using a smaller value will cause successive lines to overlap each other.
The only way to fix your exact example is introduce more markup to determine line numbers so that you can style the first/last line differently.
You could maybe slightly alter your markup (I prefer wrapping <p> tags around lines of text) and use a negative top margin?
As Matthew said, this is what lineheight does.
You could try to set the line height on an inner div (inside the one with borders), and counteract the top and bottom effect by also setting a negative top and bottom margin. But it's likely that the negative margin won't work in all browsers.
Has anyone else ever ran across this? This is the second time it's come up in as many years and I am not sure the "correct" way to solve it.
I can achieve the same results with padding in the child, but it just makes no sense.
Testing in Safari/FF.
I usually solve this problem by setting display: inline-block on outer div. It'll make outer div to occupy exactly the space necessary to display its content.
An example, showing the difference.
It is called margin-collapse. When a top and bottom margin are directly touching (not separated by anything, like a border or line break) the margins collapse into a single margin. This is not a bug. Read more about it here at SitePoint.
Sounds like margin collapsing which is natural behaviour. This is a good read:
http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2003/11/no_margin_for_error/
There are number of ways to get round margin collapsing issues. One way is to add a border
or 1px of padding around the elements so that the borders are no longer touching and so no
longer collapse.
Another way to stop margins collapsing is to change the position property of the
element.The CSS2 Specs explain that margins of absolutely and relatively positioned boxes
don't collapse. Also if you float a box it's margins no longer collapse. It's not always
appropriate to change the position properties of an element but in some situations if
you're having problems with unwanted margin collapsing, this may be an option.
The font size I need to match the design I have is 85pt, which is extremely large. In IE6 and IE7, my design is affected because the divs that contain these elements become larger than they normally are, and as a result, elements under these are pushed further down, somewhat breaking the design. I have the height defined for these elements and when I decrease the font size, the elements begin to shrink to the correct size. I've added line-height: 0; to the element and this works in all modern browsers.
Unfortunately, the design I'm working on cannot be shown publicly, but I was hoping to get some insight into other possible techniques that I could try to get the design to render correctly. The height of the parent element is 144px, which includes 10px padding on top and bottom and a top and bottom 1px border.
Unfortunately there's not a lot more that I can add to this, but I'll include whatever info I can if asked.
line-height:0 is a great start. However, I'm a little concerned about the 10px padding on the parent element. Whenever you mix padding with IE, you start to lose control over width & height.
I'd start by removing the padding-top on the parent and convert that into a margin-top:10px on the actual child element. If that still gives you trouble, remove the margin and try a position:relative on the child with a top:10px.
Finally, try adding a overflow:hidden to your parent element to force it to not budge when the font-size gets larger.
All this depends on what your child element actually is. If you convert it to an inline element (like a span, em, or strong) it might help alleviate some rendering issues, depending on your predefined styles.
Another thing to consider - are you using floats? Sometimes you'll get a double-float issue with IE and floats. A quick google for "IE double float" will show you why.
Does that help?
Convert the font-sizes to pixels and use px instead of pt. Make sure there that padding, margin and border is 0. Verify that there are no whitespace in your HTML except for between words. Whitespace can end up being displayed as a newline or space, making elements bigger than intended. Also don't set line-height to 0, set it to either auto or the same as font-size.
Thank you all for your input. Originally I needed absolute positioning on the element in question, while the parent element had relative positioning. However, using this with line-height: 0 caused the text to disappear in IE6 and 7; after trying to figure out where the text was initially, I removed absolute positioning and decided to leave the text left aligned in IE6 and 7, which affected the position of other elements as a result. I revisited the original absolute positioning and added border to the element to reveal its location. Doing this showed that it was exactly as I defined it: an element with a line-height of 0px, so the top and bottom borders were next to each other. For IE6 and 7, I defined line-height: 100%; and my text was almost where I needed it. I added top and the needed pixels and now my element is in the correct position with its line-height not affecting any of the other elements because of the positioning.
Thank you all again for your assistance.
My first thought when reading your post was to adjust the line-height, but since you've already done that, I'm not sure how much more can be done. From your summary, I gather that the design cannot be modified to account for the large font sizes.
Another answerer recommended using pixel sizes, but I would recommend using ems as they are percentage dimensions and will be more consistent across browsers, screens, and resolutions.
Line-height can be left as 0 (or set it to the height of the parent element), but you will likely see the text floating over other elements if the text's height surpasses the line-height.
Any possible way you could use an image for the text instead? That's really the only fool-proof method for getting all browsers to look consistent.