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I don't edit CSS very often, and almost every time I need to go and google the CSS box model to check whether padding is inside the border and margin outside, or vice versa. (Just checked again and padding is inside).
Does anyone have a good way of remembering this? A little mnemonic, a good explanation as to why the names are that way round ...
When working with CSS finally drives you mad the padded cell that they will put you in has the padding on the inside of the walls.
pin - P is in
You are using a box. If you were putting something in a box you would put some padding inside to make sure it didn't smack against the sides. Margin would then be the other thing.
Print the diagram from the Box Dimensions section of the specification, and put it on the wall.
To me, "padding" just sounds more inner than "margin". Perhaps thinking about the printed page would help? Margins are areas on the far outside - generally, you cannot even print to the edge - they are unmarkable. Within those margins, the content could be padded to provide an extra barrier between the content and the margin?
Once you work in CSS enough, it'll become second nature to remember this.
I've just learnt it over time - the box model is fairly simple but the main reason people find it hard is because body doesn't visibly break the model.
Really, if you give body a margin and a background you should see it surrounded by a white strip. However this isn't the case - body's padding is the same as margin. This establishes a few incorrect things about the box model.
I usually think about it like this:
margin = spacing around the box;
border = the edge of the box;
padding = space inside the box.
Padding is usually used inside. Either on the interior of a wall or a delivery box, that's simple. And if padding is inside, then margin is outside. Shouldn't be too hard.
use firebug to help you see.
Tim Saunders gave some excellent advice - when I first got started with CSS, I made a point of building a good, fully commented base stylesheet. That stylesheet has changed many times and remains a terrific resource.
However, when I ran into my own box model problems, I started using 'Mo Pi'. As in, "I'm not fat enough, I need to eat mo pi." Strange, but it worked for me. Of course, I put on twenty pounds while learning CSS...;-)
Create yourself a commented base stylesheet which you can use as a template whenever you need to create a new site or edit an existing site.
You can add to it as you grow in knowledge and apply it to various different browsers to see how various things behave.
You'll also be able to add in comments or examples about other hard to remember stuff or stuff that is counter intuitive.
Add border, even just temporarily. As you play with the numbers, you'll see the difference.
In fact, temporary borders around elements is a helpful way to work, such that you can see why floats are dropping, etc.
I know this is an answer to your question, but more of a tip. Whenever I am dealing with margin and padding, I will add a border around the part you are working with, then from there, it shows me the room I have to work with. When I am all set, I remove the border.
PAdding is a PArt of an element's PAinting: it extends the element's background. It makes sense to think of a pair element+padding as sharing a common background. Padding is analogous to the painting's canvas: the bigger the padding, the bigger the canvas and therefore background. Border (the painting's frame) would go around that pair. And margin will separate paintings on the gallery wall. Thinking about the concept of object background helps glue the pair object+padding together. The usual explanations of what is inside vs outside do not stick to memory: after a while everybody gets back to the original confusion. Remember also that margins are vertically collapsible and padding is not.
Instead of ask again and again to google you just use inspector window. In that style tab and scroll down to bottom you can see like this.
Margin:When you want move the block.
Padding: When you want move the items within a block.
Related
I know this has been asked many times, and I have been searching for the answer in a lot of places but I can't seem to fix my code. Thank you for reading this because I'm going crazy here! First I had a different z-index problem with safari, than another with explorer, but now the z-index problem I'm having with mozila I can't fix in any way. I code in chrome, where it seems to work perfectly (for me it seems at least!)
I believe now it works more or less fine in most browsers but not on mozila. The idea of the page is to make (only with CSS because that's the only language supported by the website) a flipping book of several pages. I see some examples around of CSS only flipping cards (only one page), but not a book of more than one page. So I essentially overlap several "cards", in order to give this effect. You can see the demo from codepen here: pkrein/pen/qBOewem
Btw I do know this code is not as clean as it could be, but that's the way I figured to make a fuction like that works only with CSS, and I hope it will make sense for you.
Ok, so the matter is, the content inside the book pages is not "scrollable" on firefox. I guess this is indeed a z-index problem, because when I move any page outside the book, that is, from behind the rest of the content, it scrolls fine.
Let me know if I can give any more info that could help you understand my issue!
I figured a possible solution for this. It's not quite the solution for the problem itself but it's something that can make what I want to do work.
The problem was: (what I had to remove in order to make it work):
(1) The div #content-holder holding all the text inside the flap
(2) The div .preparation-text inside the .preparation (that's the text I want to scroll). That was a scrolling div (.preparation) inside a non-scrolling div (.preparation-text). I always add a scrolling div inside a non-scrolling div in order to hide the scrollbar, by adding a high padding-right to the inside div. I know I can use code to hide the scrollbar but it do not work in all browsers.
How I fixed:
(1) I just removed the #content-holedr divs, since it was not strictly necessary.
(2) I removed the .preparation-text and transformed .preparation into a scrolling div. Then I just covered the scrollbar with an image of the same size and colors as the background (a print of the layout).
I am a mostly skilled server-end developer, and am creating an ambitious website project - all by myself. I know c#, MVC, T-SQL, LINQ, and ASP.NET pretty well. Obviously, since I'm working by myself, I have knowledge in design too. I'm obviously good with html (who isn't?). And I absolutely love jQuery! The thing is, I'm decent in my understanding of css, but css is my least knowledgeable trait. I understand programming, I also am good in design, not just because I have a decent level of knowledge in css (and jQuery) - but also because I just know what looks good (I can draw and paint on real paper too).
The thing is, I know I can probably do this with jQuery code, but I was wondering if this could also be done with css alone. On my main design (Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml) - I made the body to have a "min-width: (my value);" attribute, which, obviously isn't supported with older browsers, so I also included a transparent image of a default width of 1px that I set to stretch to my desired width also - it works in controlling the width of the page (to the minimum I desired). But - I have a site header div which resides at the top of the page. I have a part of that header div with elements positioned on the far right - which is nice when the browser is on a device that is large enough and the browser is in decent size, but once the browser is set to a size less than my desired minimum width, then the scroll bar shows up, and I can move it around as expected. But, the elements in that header div do not stay to the far right in conjunction with my minimum width - but stay on the right of the current window size instead. I have the main div holding the elements itself set to be in fixed position, I tried making those elements relative with no success. I tried a few ideas, the problem still persists.
So, as I said, I am well aware of concepts using jQuery that can do what I have previously described I desire in these regards, but, as I also said, I know a decent amount of css, but am the least close to an "expert" in css than anything else I know. I just have a strong suspicion what I desire here can be done with css and css alone (also, it would be nice to have it compatible with most browsers, or at the least most browsers made after the year 2008).
Can someone please give me some good information in these regards?
I just remembered asking this question.
I actually found a way to go about doing what I wrote I desired here through some experimentation that eventually got me to where I needed to be. What I did was instead of using relative positioning - which I thought was the proper way of doing this, I used absolute positioning inside the absolute positioned top header div. I didn't think this would be the solution at the time of asking the question, I assumed setting something as absolute positon - even inside something that is already absolute positioned - would put it in a new context of absolute positioning like any absolute positioned element inside the body tag. What I discovered was if I put an absolute positioned element inside another absolute positioned element - the context of the absolute positioning was based on the original absolute positioned element - so top (or left for that matter) 0px wasn't 0px from the context of the body (the very top of the page) - but - 0px from the element that the element is inside of. I think that's a pretty explanation of it, so I'll end explaining it here.
I'm sure there's plenty of people that know css much more than I do, and think this issue I had here is so basic, but, I did ask the question, and I might as well answer it based upon the solution I used. I could've posted an example on jsfiddle like asked for in a comment, but I thought my explanation was good enough, and since no one offered an answer based on my question alone, I decided to try to address the issue with experimentation, which I had success with.
I'm having trouble figuring this one out, it's a menu I am changing a bit to make it more usable on touch devices. Thus I need the first part of the CSS to stay as it is for normal screens, and then have to overwrite it with the touch styles. But I am trying to position the sub menu of services below services when services is selected. See the sketch. I have created a fiddle to show my problem.
My main problem, and what would solve it, is that I can't seem to get the ul.level_2 to position itself under the selected li, neither with absolute position or floating and clearing. Any ideas?
JS fiddle of problem
I sipmlyfied your example a bit to show you what is the minimal required css to achieve this. http://jsfiddle.net/3EKAq/10/
The positioning of the submenu should be fairly easy, it goes almost automaticly, no positioning required as you can see.
I think the key lies in the clearing of the menu element you want to appear on the left, the 4th one in this case. You could also consider working with the :n-th child css3 selector, but i would not do that for cross browser compatibility.
Hope this puts you in the right direction. Feel free to let us know if you need any more help!
I'm pretty much as new to CSS as it gets and what I'm trying to do right now is just design a very simple/basic splash or landing page for a small business.
Here is the url for the site: My site
Now if you go on any browser, lets say google chrome and you zoom out or in (ctrl -/+) you will notice that the website layout starts to "break apart" in that all my divs just start shifting around. I obviously dont want this, and just want the site to remain the same when people zoom in or out, pretty much like all good sites haha.
I know it must have something to do with positioning, but I can't figure it our for the life or me. Last night I spent hours browsing similar questions but I can figure it out.
I'm not posting the code as to take up more space, I'm assuming since I gave you the URL you'll be able to retrieve the code from there.
I also have a few more, smaller questions:
1) if you open my site on chrome, or ie you'll notice that after the "terms and conditions" on the bottom of the page, the site ends, like it should. however, if you go on firefox, you'll notice that after the "terms and conditions" the background so to speak continues for a while. why is this and how can i fix it?
2) you'll notice that on different browsers positioning of elements is slightly different.
most noticeably if you look or chrome/firefox and then internet explorer 9 you'll notice that the "terms and conditions" are slightly higher than in chrome or ff and thus slightly touching the main content area. is there a way to fix this?
3) what is an efficient, effective way to center divs? For example, I want to center the "sign up" button perfectly centered relative in the main content area. ive pretty much just been eyeing it out and using relative positioning to center it. what is a more accurate way to center it?
Thanks, and sorry if these questions seem a little redundant. if you need any clarification on anything I'll be monitoring this question like a hawk.
Cheers
When you zoom in or out, you will encounter issues because of rounding and text rendering. It is a good idea to make sure the layout can survive a bit of stretching without breaking down.
Relative positioning is affected by issues mentioned in #1, and therefore unreliable.
Look into using something to remove the properties that the various browsers will apply. You could use a reset to give you something more workable or try to normalize the values to make them more even between browers.
For (horizontal) centering you have some options:
If you have a container with "text-align:center" it will center all child elements that are inline-blocks or inline.
If you want to center a block element, you can use "margin: 0 auto" to center it horizontally and remove vertical margins.
If you want to center an absolutely positioned element, you can use "left: 50%, margin-left: -(width of element/2)".
In addition to attempting to get rid of relative positioning, I would recommend that you do not explicitly set the height of the body element. Generally you want the elements to manage their own size, that way they will be more robust.
If you use "position: relative" now because that is what you know how to use, I would suggest you try using "float: left" (or right), or changing the display type (display: inline-block). That may help you get started in the right direction.
not sure for your points 1 & 2, but as for 3 what i've come to use is the following have the div i want to center and then use width : some-percentage; margin-left : 100-(some_percentage)*0.5 ;, where some percentage is the width I want to use.
a couple suggestions before go into fixing the zoom in and zoom out issue.
Don't use <div> to wrap around text.
Use <h1> tags for header
Store your CSS in a separate css file.
You defined the header section that's great, but do that for container and footer as well.
Comments! That would make the job much easier for people who try to help you.
my question is a bit tricky and I'm not really sure if it is possible, but I think I have a memory of doing it before or seeing it somewhere.
So, I am making a horisontal menu. I have a div block of size 980x36px. It has a background image:
Inside I have links text) which I made block elements (display: block;) and floated left. So now it would look more like this:
Now I want all active links and all links that are mouse-overed to have a different background, like this:
The problem here is that my background image (on hover) is again 980x36 px and is different in the different horisontal positions just like the first background, blue on the left and red on the right:
So, now when I hover on a link I must set the background position some negative horisontal value, for example for the third link I should set something like background-position: -233px 0px; so the colors of the two backgrounds would fit.
My question is how can this be acomplished automaticaly? Here is the tricky part: I don't know the width of all links since they are text and should support multi-language (so they obviously cannot be pre-made images). I don't want to use PNG (I could easily make a semi-transparent 'glass' which would overlay with the first background and create the same effect) - because of.. guess who, yes IE6. And finally I want this to be done with a nice, clean and widely supported technique, so JavaScript is out of the question (I know it's easy, I can make it, I just don't want to use it).
The thing that is familiar in this situation is the background-attachment: fixed; method. In this case it would be great if I could fix the position of the background of each link to the position of the container div. That would be perfect! Just what I need! Each link will be on it's place, but the background would render as if it was on the container div! Well, that's the problem, if anyone knows a good solution.. If not I should consider the less pain, which in my opinion, currently is to try the PNG way with some IE fixer maybe?
You should just use a .png as you described in your question.
To fix IE6, you should use one of the many available JavaScript-based .png fixes, such as:
http://www.dillerdesign.com/experiment/DD_belatedPNG/
It's just not worth crippling yourself by pandering to the minuscule percentage of users that are using IE6 and have JavaScript disabled.
(yes, I realise the question is old, and you've probably already created your menu)
The quickest solution that comes to my mind is using jQuery to position the background accordingly (you can check each element's position and just change its CSS background position).