0:00
[SOUND] Okay, so in the previous segment we spoke
about the fact that you should always try to use
box sizing border box as your box sizing model.
Now, of course, you don't want to specify box sizing border box on every
element in your entire HTML, so you definitely want to specify it once and
then have it be inherited everywhere.
So let's go ahead and try to do that.
Let's remove this border box from here.
And body seems to be like a natural place to put it since
body is the top level element and it should inherit everywhere else.
So if I place the box size and border box here and
then I refresh, this should stay the same.
It didn't work.
Now, why it didn't that work?
It jumped back to the content box.
Well, the reason that didn't work is because
box sizing is one of those CSS properties that is not inherited.
You can't set it on the parent element and
then expect that the child elements will inherit that property.
So how do we get around that?
Well, the way we get around it is by learning about one more selector.
And that selector is the star selector.
Let's go back up here and we'll go ahead and say star.
And then we'll cut and paste that border box property right here.
Now what is the star?
First let's refresh to see if it worked.
And sure enough, now it's working.
What star does, star selector says is, go ahead and
select every element there is and apply these particular CSS properties to them.
The difference between star and placing some property in a parent element for
example is that star says I am not asking you to inherit anything,
I am saying select every element.
Which means it's as if it took this property and this value and
then it went to the HTML and it applied it to every element it saw, it applied
that particular property and value, which in this case is box-sizing: border-box.
So that's how properties like box-sizing are applied across your entire page.
Now I told you that border-box is a property that's new in CSS3.
Whenever you hear something like that an alarm bell should go off.
Does every browser that I deal with support border-box?
Well, we know just the resource to check that out.
And we'll go to the website called www.caniuse.com and
we'll type in border box.
Border Box is a CSS3 box sizing property, and if we take a look, excellent!
Every single browser is green.
So, every single browser fully supports this property value.
Okay, so next, let's close this up and
let's try to advance our margin understanding a little bit better.
2:45
Okay, so let's take a look at this diagram.
We have two boxes next to each other, in other words two elements, and
the gray part is the margins.
Well, margins that are left to right are cumulative.
So if I have a margin, right margin of 40 pixels on the left box and
a left margin of 50 pixels on the right box.
The cumulative margin will be 90 pixels.
40 plus 50.
And that's pretty simple and this is exactly what you would expect.
But what happens if you have one element on top of the other element.
Which let's say these are two divs and each one is specifying a margin.
So one is specifying margin of 30, margin top for the bottom.
For the bottom element margin top is 30, and for
the top element margin bottom is 20.
Would you expect this to be 50 pixels, the cumulative?
Well, the answer is it won't be, the answer is the margins collapse, and
the larger margin wins.
So the actual distance between the border of one element and
the border of another element will be, in this case,
30 pixels, meaning the larger margin will win and the other one will just collapse.
Let's take a look at an example inside our code editor.
3:58
Okay so going back to the same file Box Model before that HTML,
we can take a look and see that we have a h1 here and
we defined a margin-bottom of 30 pixels on h1.
Let's go ahead and go to our box and recture we'll move the margin altogether.
And refresh, will take a look what it is without the margin.
So, you could see there's some margin going on here and
that margin is coming from this h1 here margin bottom.
Let's go ahead and define a margin top so,
when you need a margin bottom is on h1 here, when you need margin top on our box.
Let's define a margin top of 20 pixels and
when we do that when we refresh absolutely nothing will happen.
And the reason that is is because the box is defining a 20 pixel margin.
Yet, the h1 ia already defining a 30 pixels margin.
So when they come together and touch,
they collapse into whatever the larger margin is.
So in this case, that's 30.
However if I made the margin to be 40 and
let's say even 50 pixels now you'll see that the box will move down because now
the box has a larger margin than the one specified on h1.
So there is now a bigger distance between the box model h1 and
the actual box and it's actually 50 pixels.
We can also notice, by the way, that the box model,
the words box model are not flush at the top with the corner of the browser.
Now why is that?
Let's go and investigate.
Let's go and inspect the element.
Let's take a look, it's got a margin of 21.4 something.
And where is this margin coming from?
Well, it's coming from, again, the user agent style sheet.
And the reason it's coming here is because of some browser specific prefixes that we
actually haven't talked about that are defining the margin before and
margin after.
We're not going to delve too much into this, but the bottom line it means that
before the element and after the element they'll define some margin.
Now the reason our margin on the body that was specified margin:
0 is not working here is very simple.
Body says anything that is below me and
inside of me is going to have the margin inherited.
But that's only if you don't override it specifically for that element.
As you see here, the user agent stylesheet has a selector h1
that is specifically overriding the margin, which therefore, wins.
This is a bit of a side point but how do we override this?
Well, now that we know about the star selector, it's easy.
You could just say and move the padding in the margin to the star selector.
And now, what this is basically saying is that I am selecting
every element specifically, and then I'm overriding its margin.
So, if I refresh the page now, you could see now it's flushed together to the top.
We won't necessarily be doing this in our pages left and
right, but at least now you know that if you wanted to reset in,
it's called CSS resetting, if you wanted to reset the CSS browser defaults
you would do this most of the time using the star selector.
Yaakov ChaikinAdjunct Professor, Graduate Computer Science
