Question

HTML and CSS boggle my mind sometimes.

A DIV with a border shows its background color for the full height of the element and its contents. Why is it that without a border, a DIV will assume (reverse inherit?) its child’s margins?

As an example, here is a JSFiddle illustrating the behavior with and without borders.

http://jsfiddle.net/ahNUX

http://jsfiddle.net/ahNUX/1/

Does anyone care to explain how this is a “feature” and not some kind of bug?

Update: adding 1px of padding to the parent is a quick fix.

Answer 1

Sure. In CSS, by default, adjacent top and bottom margins overlap each other. This was a sensible workaround before the adjacent sibling selector (+) was thought of/became well-supported, as it meant that if you wrote h2 {margin-top: 3em;}, you’d have 3ems worth of space above your h2s even if there was a paragraph before it with a bottom margin of 1em.

In your second example, because the <div> doesn’t have any top or bottom padding or borders, its top and bottom margins are adjacent to the <h1>‘s default top and bottom margins. Even though the <div>’s margins don’t have any height, they’re still treated as if they exist, and so the <h1>’s margins have to overlap them. As the <div>s margins are by definition outside of the background-color area of the <div>, the <h1>’s margins have to be positioned outside too.

In your first example, because the <div> has a border, its margins are no longer adjacent to the <h1>’s margins, so no overlapping occurs. You can get the same effect by adding top and bottom padding to the <div>: http://jsfiddle.net/ahNUX/7/

(I’m not sure what you mean about the <div> “reverse-inheriting” its child’s padding though. In your examples, neither the <div> nor the <h1> have any padding. The space inside the <div> in your first example is created by the <h1>’s top and bottom margin.)