Adjust the Padding of an Element

HTML-CSS
1

Tell us what’s happening:

why is the word ‘margin’ inside of the yellow box when in the code it’s not in the div? also if I rewrite the ‘margin’ line code to any text in the

element, it goes out, why?

Your code so far


<style>
  .injected-text {
    margin-bottom: -25px;
    text-align: center;
  }

  .box {
    border-style: solid;
    border-color: black;
    border-width: 5px;
    text-align: center;
  }

  .yellow-box {
    background-color: yellow;
    padding: 10px;
  }
  
  .red-box {
    background-color: crimson;
    color: #fff;
    padding: 20px;
  }

  .blue-box {
    background-color: blue;
    color: #fff;
    padding: 20px;
  }
</style>
<h5 class="injected-text">margin</h5>

<div class="box yellow-box">
  <h5 class="box red-box">padding</h5>
  <h5 class="box blue-box">padding</h5>
</div>

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 Safari/537.36.

Link to the challenge:
https://learn.freecodecamp.org/responsive-web-design/basic-css/adjust-the-padding-of-an-element

2

It’s because of this code.

.injected-text {
margin-bottom: -25px;
}

Which puts the header downwards.

Margin moves an element around relative to its position. So giving something margins will move itself to whatever values you give to.

3

More specifically, it is because of the negative margin.

Using a negative top/bottom margin can be seen as pulling as opposed to a positive, which is pushing. But, you are right to be curious about why the margin div seems to be breaking into the box, that would otherwise, be a barrier, at least when talking about two statically positioned blocks. Using negative margin, is in fact, an alternative to relative/absolute positioning, well in some cases at least.

The assignment two assignments from the one you are on talks a bit about negative margin, unfortunately IMO it does a pretty bad job of it saying.

“If you set an element’s margin to a negative value, the element will grow larger.”

This is only true of the left/right negative margin, not top/bottom. It also doesn’t actually talk much (at all) about how or why to use negative margins.

Here is a pretty old but still relevant smashingmagazine article about using negative margins.