You’ve likely experienced the frustration of having your intended layout not render as expected. After adding 27 style rules to get it perfect, you still might not know which rule solved your problem. With a model as open and powerful as that contained within CSS, no book could
hope to cover every possible way of combining properties and effects.
You will undoubtedly go on to discover new ways of using CSS. With a thorough grasp of how the visual rendering model
works, however, you’ll be better able to determine whether a behavior is a
correct (if unexpected) consequence of the rendering engine CSS defines.
Basic Boxes
At its core, CSS assumes that every element generates one or more
rectangular boxes, called element boxes. (Future versions of the
specification may allow for nonrectangular shapes, and indeed changes have been proposed, but for now all boxes are still
rectangular.)
Each element box has a content area at its center. This content area is
surrounded by optional amounts of padding, borders, outlines, and
margins. These areas are considered optional because they could all be
set to a size of 0, effectively removing them from the element box.
Figure 6-1 shows an example content area, along with the surrounding
regions of padding, borders, and margins.
Figure 6-1. The content area and its surroundings
Before looking at the properties ...
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