Managing the CSS Box Model

The following is an extract from our book, CSS Master, written by Tiffany Brown. Copies are sold in stores worldwide, or you can buy it in ebook form here.

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Perhaps the most important point to understand about CSS is this: Everything is a box. More specifically, every element in a document generates a box. This box may be a block-level box, or it may be an inline-level box. The box type determines how the element affects page layout.

Whether or not an element creates a box and which type of box it creates will depend on the markup language. CSS developed as a way to style HTML documents so, as a result, much of the CSS visual rendering model is rooted in HTML's distinction between block-level and inline elements. By default, elements such as p and section create block-level boxes but a, span, and em create inline boxes. SVG, on the other hand, does not use the box model, so most layout-related CSS properties fail to work with SVG.

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by Tiffany Brown via SitePoint