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CSS

Posted by Michael Sheaver
Michael Sheaver
2,751 Points

Padding property adds more space than wanted

I have a single line for my page footer, a <p> element wrapped inside of a <footer> element, like here:

<footer>
  <p>this is my footer</p>
</footer>

Inside my CSS, I am trying to get control of the padding, like so:

footer {
  padding: 1px;
}

The problem is that if I set the padding to anything but zero in this property, it adds what appears to be one whole em to the padding, something that I do not want. What is causing this, and how can I cleanly fix it?

1 Answer

Andrew McCormick
Andrew McCormick
17,730 Points
Andrew McCormick
Andrew McCormick
17,730 Points

Is this the only style sheet being used? Also are using a browser reset at the top of your CSS?
Try using Firebug or DeveloperTools to see what's affecting your footer element.

Michael Sheaver
Michael Sheaver
2,751 Points

I am using the updated normalize CSS at the beginning of my styles, instead of the old reset. I used Chrome's inspect element feature, but cannot seem to find out where exactly the extra padding is coming from. I did google this, and it seems to be a common problem. Why would a padding of 0 behave as expected, but a padding of 1 blow it up huge, like about 25px or so?

Update: When I inspect the element in DevTools, it shows the following styles being applied by the user agent stylesheet:

 p {
  display: block;
  -webkit-margin-before: 1em;
  -webkit-margin-after: 1em;
  -webkit-margin-start: 0px;
  -webkit-margin-end: 0px;
}

What I finally had to do was add the following rule to specifically target the paragraph within the footer container:

footer p {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 1px;
}

My question is this: why didn't the padding: 0 rule cascade down from the footer element into the child p element?