Question

Consider you have a div with fixed height and weight (in the drawing the innermost one), and you want the surrounding divs to contain it, with an out margin of e.g. 1 em. How would you do that?

+--------+
| +-----+|
| |+---+||
| ||   |||
| |+---+||
| +-----+|
+--------+

Answer 1

One way is to use the inline-block display style:

div { border: 1px solid blue; } 
div.wrapper { 
  border: 1px solid red;
  padding: 1em;
  display: inline-block;
}

For this HTML:

<div class="wrapper">
<div class="wrapper">
<div style="width: 100px; height: 83px;">This</div>
</div>
</div>

Here’s an example: http://jsfiddle.net/redler/zSrXA/

You can also try playing with display: table-cell.