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It makes sense as HTML was a document format. Document: thing you print, in this case on 90s printers. You need a margin!

The genius is you get a reasonable reading experience out of the box with default styles.

Noone wants their first character kissing the browser window frame.

I am betting what is old is new and 8px borders will come back in fashion.

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We obviously put margins on stuff, but never at the body element for many reasons. Padding would be better for example. The margin only makes sense if you don’t apply any further styling.

Margins collapse

if you have h1 with top margin 10px, and body margin 8px, it "adds" up to 10px, not 18px.

Once you write article-based sites, without a random navbar that people don't want, then it can become quite nice

"A thing you print" just isn't the definition of a document.

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