Difference between center and auto

HTML-CSS
1

How come center value doesn’t work where as auto value seems to?..

  **Your code so far**

/* file: index.html */
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
  <title>Cafe Menu</title>
  <link href="styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>
  <div class="menu">
    <header>
      <h1>CAMPER CAFE</h1>
      <p class="established">Est. 2020</p>
    </header>
    <hr>
    <main>
      <section>
        <h2>Coffee</h2>
        <img src="https://cdn.freecodecamp.org/curriculum/css-cafe/coffee.jpg" alt="coffee icon"/>
        <article class="item">
          <p class="flavor">French Vanilla</p><p class="price">3.00</p>
        </article>
        <article class="item">
          <p class="flavor">Caramel Macchiato</p><p class="price">3.75</p>
        </article>
        <article class="item">
          <p class="flavor">Pumpkin Spice</p><p class="price">3.50</p>
        </article>
        <article class="item">
          <p class="flavor">Hazelnut</p><p class="price">4.00</p>
        </article>
        <article class="item">
          <p class="flavor">Mocha</p><p class="price">4.50</p>
        </article>
      </section>
      <section>
        <h2>Desserts</h2>
        <article class="item">
          <p class="dessert">Donut</p><p class="price">1.50</p>
        </article>
        <article class="item">
          <p class="dessert">Cherry Pie</p><p class="price">2.75</p>
        </article>
        <article class="item">
          <p class="dessert">Cheesecake</p><p class="price">3.00</p>
        </article>
        <article class="item">
          <p class="dessert">Cinnamon Roll</p><p class="price">2.50</p>
        </article>
      </section>
    </main>
    <hr class="bottom-line">
    <footer>
      <p>
        <a href="https://www.freecodecamp.org" target="_blank">Visit our website</a>
      </p>
      <p class="address">123 Free Code Camp Drive</p>
    </footer>
  </div>
</body>
<html>

/* file: styles.css */
body {
background-image: url(https://cdn.freecodecamp.org/curriculum/css-cafe/beans.jpg);
font-family: sans-serif;
padding: 20px;
}

h1 {
font-size: 40px;
margin-top: 0;
margin-bottom: 15px;
}

h2 {
font-size: 30px;
}

.established {
font-style: italic;
}

h1, h2, p {
text-align: center;
}

.menu {
width: 80%;
background-color: burlywood;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
padding: 20px;
max-width: 500px;
}

img {display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:center;}

hr {
height: 2px;
background-color: brown;
border-color: brown;
}

.bottom-line {
margin-top: 25px;
}

h1, h2 {
font-family: Impact, serif;
}

.item p {
display: inline-block;
margin-top: 5px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
font-size: 18px;
}

.flavor, .dessert {
text-align: left;
width: 75%;
}

.price {
text-align: right;
width: 25%
}

/* FOOTER */

footer {
font-size: 14px;
}

.address {
margin-bottom: 5px;
}

a {
color: black;
}

a:visited {
color: black;
}

a:hover {
color: brown;
}

a:active {
color: brown;
}

  **Your browser information:**

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/102.0.5005.63 Safari/537.36 Edg/102.0.1245.39

Challenge: Step 90

Link to the challenge:

2

Margin left and right both will be auto.

This give them (left or right) equally space.

3

center isn’t a valid value for the margin property. Margins live on the outside of an element, so using center for a margin value wouldn’t really make sense sense. The most common use of the value center is to center align content inside of a block element or table cell. There might be other properties you can use it for as well but I’m drawing a blank right now.

But using auto on a margin value tells the browser to do it’s best to add margins to the element and in most cases that means it will center the element if both of the opposing margin sides are set to auto.

4

As said, center isn’t a valid value for margin.

But as an aside, if you added text-align: center to the parent container it would center the image (as long as the image remains inline/inline-block).

.menu section {
  text-align: center;
}

But that affects all child elements and is likely not what you would want.

5

Thanks, it does seem like a bit of a silly question now that you’ve explained it :sweat_smile:

6

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