To push it even more, let's give our

s' a  margin-bottom to 100px:

p { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 100px; } .links { margin-top: 40px; } 

Again, the two margins don't add together, they collapse into one another, so the total space here is 100px.

This is a good thing

In cases like this, it's actually a good thing, though. If there are several elements with different margins, there is no need to add the margins together to see how large the gap between the elements is because we can rely on the fact that the larger margin always wins.

We often don't even think about it, it just works the way we expect it to work.

When it's not a good thing

That said, one instance where margin collapse causes all sorts of confusion is when the first child within an element has a margin-top that merges with the parent's margin-top.

Let's look at that same screenshot again:

There is a white space between the top of the viewport and the black box. That's not from the body (it's much bigger than the 8px margin the body would have).

Care to guess where it's coming from?

It's actually coming from the

at the top of that black box.

Remember when I mentioned that the user-agent stylehsheets can do some odd things?

To help explain exactly what's happening here, let's add a much bigger margin-top to the h1.

.card { background: #000; color: white; width: 560px; margin: 0 auto; } h1 { font-size: 24px; margin-top: 100px; } p { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 100px; } .links { margin-top: 10px; } 

I see people do this all the time, trying to push the title down within its parent. However, rather than working as expected, we get a giant space on top of the entire card!

This is because the margin-top on the

merges with the margin-top on the parent element.

There is nothing separating the top of the child and the parent in this case. So when we add margin-top to the child, it touches the parent's margin-top. And, as we saw above, when two margins touch one another, they merge into a single margin.

So while we are giving the margin to the child, it's being applied to the parent.

This is why people hate CSS.

Similarly, in the code above we gave all paragraphs a margin-bottom. That margin on the p.link elements touches the margin-bottom of the .card element, which means that the two merge together and the margin affects the .card element instead of the links.

Although this isn't causing an issue for the site we are currently creating, it could cause problems if we later decided to add further elements to the page.

The problem is, we're using margin for the wrong purpose

If I want space between the top of the .card element and the children inside it, I shouldn't be using margin anyway.

Beginners often get mixed up between margin and padding. My general rule of thumb is if you want empty space, use margin. If you want more background, use padding.

In this case, we want our .card to have more background, so we shouldn't be adding a margin to its children. Instead we should add padding to that element itself.

In the image above, we can see the padding and the margin. The

on top still has a margin, but it's no longer merging with the .card because the padding has added in a buffer. This prevents the .card's and h1 margin from touching one another.

As the padding adds sufficient space between the

s and the

s, we can now remove the margins we previously added to them.

Margins don't always collapse

There are some exceptions to collapsing margins. The direct descendants of grid and flex parents do not have collapsing margins.

Cue the ?.

But there is a bit of a workaround for this as well, which brings us full circle back to those user agent-stylesheets we talked about at the start.

There is an easy way to avoid even thinking about collapsing margins

First off, there is my general rule of thumb that I talked about above:

• If you need empty space, use margin
• If you need more background, use padding

That will get you out of trouble most of the time. But let's add an extra rule to this that will help even more:

• Try to avoid margin-top except when you really need it

This rule is in a bit of conflict with the user-agent-styles, which set a margin-top and margin-bottom to a bunch of elements, which is one reason I often will do something like this:

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, ul, ol { margin: 0 0 1em 0; }

It eliminates a lot of the issues that come from collapsing margins on their own, as well as differences in your layout when some places are using flex or grid and others are not.

(Note: if you inspect the code here on freeCodeCamp, you'll see they do something similar as well!)

It's not a perfect solution, and I often do use a little margin-top on certain subtitles or in specific situations where it's called for. But I'm doing it very intentionally instead of letting the user-agent-styles potentially get in the way in some unforeseen way.

These lessons are just a snippet of my much larger course on responsive web design. To continue this coding journey, take a look at the course.

In the course I cover an introduction to responsive web design, and dive into both flexbox and grid, all the while trying to show people how much fun CSS really is once you start to understand how it works.

Happy coding :)