Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide

Padding

Between the borders and the content area, we find the padding of the element box. It will come as no surprise that the simplest property used to affect this area is called padding .

padding

Values

[ <length> | <percentage> ]{1,4}

Initial value

0

Inherited

no

Applies to

all elements

Note

Percentage values refer to the width of the parent element.

As you can see, this property accepts any length value or a percentage. That’s all. So if you want all H1 elements to have 10 pixels of padding on all sides, it’s this easy, as the result shown in Figure 7-56 makes clear:

H1 {padding: 10px; background-color: silver;}

Figure 7-56. Padding applied to an H1 element

On the other hand, we might want H1 elements to have uneven padding and H2 elements to have regular padding, as shown in Figure 7-57:

H1 {padding: 10px 0.25em 3ex 3cm;} /* uneven padding */
H2 {padding: 0.5em 2em;} /* values replicate to the bottom and left sides */

Figure 7-57. Uneven padding

It’s a little tough to see the padding, though, so let’s add a background color, as shown in Figure 7-58:

H1 {padding: 10px 0.25em 3ex 3cm; background: silver;} 
H2 {padding: 0.5em 2em; background: silver;}

Figure 7-58. Uneven padding with background colors ...