Difference between margin and padding
Difference between margin and padding

Today’s box model knowledge has become so important and with the advancement of internet, web, or technology. It has become evident on how easy it is to search out the web and grab information one needs on the padding and margin properties explained in this article. If you have undertaken a career in Computer science or information communications and technology, or we development similar to other millions of students. Then you must have asked also about the difference between margin and padding in CSS w3schools. Information below clearly answers w3schools mostly sought question involving ‘Box model’, CSS positioning, padding and margin.

What is box model in CSS with example?

The CSS Box Model is popular methods used to create a definition way for how HTML elements are organized on the screen when developing a website using HTML and CSS. This CSS box model is an approach developers apply which accounts for important options such as adding margins to elements, padding of elements.

Border adjustments, and all the other CSS properties that manipulate HTML elements, help to give a website an expected look on the screen and good user experience. CSS box model importantly considers each element having or been its own box.

The CSS box model is essentially just a box that wraps around every HTML element. This box consists of three important properties namely: margins, borders, padding, and the actual content inside the box.

When coding Is it better to use margin or padding?

Difference between the two is that padding refers to space that’s left inside or within a box. In html all elements are considered to be a box which stores other elements. There’s inline elements and block elements, the difference been with inline elements they’re aligned next to each other and minimize as width decreases or increases. While block elements push each other to the next line because they do take up full width of the space available.

Difference between margin and padding in CSS

With this in mind and knowing how these elements are arranged, a good expected standard and rule of thumb is to always use margin when you want to space an element in relation to its closest relative and padding is used only when adjusting the box appearance.

For instance increasing its size one must apply padding because Margin won’t change the size of the element, but padding will make the element bigger. “Box model” gets implemented when working with padding, margin, design and layout.

The CSS padding

Answer!: The CSS padding properties are always used to generate space around an element’s content, inside of any defined borders. There are different properties for setting the required padding for each side of your HTML element from (top, right, bottom, and left position).

The CSS margin

Answer!: The CSS margin properties are used by developers to create space around elements from close or other near elements, outside of any defined borders. The best part with modern CSS, you as the developer you absolutely have full control over the margins specifications. There are four available properties for setting the margin of an element in HTML for each side of an element from the (top, right, bottom, and left).

Image below shows difference between margin and padding in CSS

Border-box vs content-box

Border-box refers to border around an element which includes the width and height. Content-box refers to width and height of an element that is holding content. Border, padding and margin aren’t part of the width or height of the content box.

Block and inline boxes

In CSS we broadly have two major types of boxes namely called ‘block boxes’ and ‘inline boxes’. These are different based on CSS characteristics referring to how these boxes behaves in terms of page flow, padding, width, height, margin, and content holding, in relation to other boxes on the page. Boxes also have an inner display type and an outer display type.

How do you adjust a box-sizing border-box?


Border-box essentially tells the browser to always account for any border and padding in the values you specify during element placing and positioning for an element’s width and height. If you set for example an element’s width to be 200 pixels, that exact 200 pixels will include any padding you added to the element, then the content box will automatically shrink to absorb that extra width left around the element.

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