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CSS How to Make a Website Styling Web Pages and Navigation Review: Styling Web Pages and Navigation

Posted by Xiao Wang
Xiao Wang
1,519 Points

page styling difference between ul, li and a

I'm playing around with styling in these three selector in nav, and got a little confused about what the content areas of these three selectors: "ul, li and a".

For example, 3 situations when na li {display: inline-block},

  1. na ul {margin: 10px} 2 na li { margin: 10px}
  2. na a { margin: 10px}

when I set margin: 10px for ul, nothing changed; same to li and it applied margin in four directions; whereas same to a and it applied only on left-right directions (inline-block applied to li).

Can anyone draw me a picture (box and lines) to show how exactly are these three selectors' content areas? Thanks.

3 Answers

Nicholas Mejia
Nicholas Mejia
23,800 Points

Tell me if this helps:

http://www.nickmejia.com/img/example.jpg

Here is the code that corresponds so you can see what color and border refers to the element being styled:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type" />
<title>Untitled 1</title>
<style>
    ul{
        border: 1px red solid;
        margin: 2px;
}
    li{
        border: 2px blue dotted;
        margin: 2px;
}
    a{
        border: 3px green dashed;
        margin: 2px;
}
</style>
</head>

<body>

<nav>
    <ul>
        <li><a href="#">Item 1</a></li>
        <li><a href="#">Item 2</a></li>
        <li><a href="#">Item 3</a></li>
        <li><a href="#">Item 4</a></li>
        <li><a href="#">Item 5</a></li>
    </ul>
</nav>

</body>

</html>
Nicholas Mejia
Nicholas Mejia
23,800 Points
Nicholas Mejia
Nicholas Mejia
23,800 Points

Can you post your code so anyone who wants to help can get a better idea of what your doing?

Xiao Wang
Xiao Wang
1,519 Points

Edited, I'm a beginner by the way.

Nicholas Mejia
Nicholas Mejia
23,800 Points
Nicholas Mejia
Nicholas Mejia
23,800 Points

I also just noticed that you wanted them set to inline style too, so here it is styled as such:

http://www.nickmejia.com/img/example2.jpg

Xiao Wang
Xiao Wang
1,519 Points

This is exactly what I asked for. Great example! Thanks a lot Nick!