One of my favorite parts of building a project is designing the layout of frontend and using CSS to build a clean and user friendly site. When you talk about design and layout, you have to consider the box model. Each HTML element consists of four elements: the margins, borders, padding, and the content.
The innermost box is content, and the content can be text or images, and the dimensions of this box are referred to as content width and content height. The padding is a transparent area around the content. Padding is important as it gives content space from the border and helps make the page easier to look at from a user’s point of view. Imagine having a box with text on it. A box without padding would have the words right up to the edges of the content box, while a box with padding would have an invisible space around it. A border goes around the padding and the content, and the thickness of the border can be determined by border-width. You can also set a specific style and color of the border as well. The margin area is a empty area so the element is separated from neighboring elements. Dimensions of the margin can be determined by margin-box width and margin box height. An important thing to remember is that the margin does not necessarily affect the size of the box, but it affects how that element interacts with other elements.
When building the layout for a website, you can set the width and height properties of an element, but to account for the full size of an element, you must also consider the other three elements (padding, borders, and margins). Let’s say you want to create an element with a height of 100px. The content could have a height of 75px, the padding could be 10px, the border could be 2.5px, and with a margin of 0px, you would have an element with a height of 100px.
Total height = content height + 2(padding height) + 2(border height) + 2(margin height) = 75px + 2(10)px + 2(2.5)px + 2(0)px = 100px
Since every element in a website is essentially a rectangular box, it’s important to remember the box model as you build something. Knowing the box model will help build a clean and user friendly interface.
For more information, I found this article to be a great resource!
