Hacker News Reader

I've felt for years that the "broken" IE model made more sense. Your element has a height and width, padding pushes inward against interior content and margin pushes outward against exterior content.

Glad to see others think this too, I always thought it was just me.

View on HN

>padding pushes inward against interior content and margin pushes outward against exterior content.

That actually seems the wrong way round to me. If you think about a document, the margin is what separates text from the edge of the page (or interior padding, if you will). Padding, to me, implies an area around an element that other elements can't touch.

Yes, you're right, that makes more sense. Now let's never bring this up ever again for fear of confusing people some more.

No, you're looking at it the wrong way. What you call the paper's margin is actually the paper's padding. Or better yet, when you are setting the margin of a document you are actually setting the margin of all the text on the document to the defined width.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com