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CSS

Arikaturika Tumojenko
Arikaturika Tumojenko
8,897 Points
Posted by Arikaturika Tumojenko
Arikaturika Tumojenko
8,897 Points

What's the downside of getting rid of the white space in the HTML?

What's the downside of writing your HTML code like this to eliminate white space between list elements?

                                    <li><a href="#">ice cream</a></li><li>
                <a href="#">donuts</a></li><li>
                <a href="#">tea</a></li><li>
                <a href="#">coffee</a></li>

It's just a personal preference? I find playing with negative margins to be more complicated since they depend on the font size.

2 Answers

Ashton Holgate
Ashton Holgate
6,021 Points
Ashton Holgate
Ashton Holgate
6,021 Points

I agree completely. For me it seems to make the most sense to exclude the list closing brackets, thus perfectly joining together the list items no matter the font size while writing less code, and then adding a margin-right value to add distance between the list items if necessary.

Perhaps Guil wanted to illustrate various methods? I'm not entirely sure why adding negative margins, which must be played around with relative to font size, is superior.

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
229,783 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
229,783 Points

:point_right: The downside is that it can be a little hard to read and non-intuitive to maintain.

But the benefits can outweigh the drawbacks, and it is a perfectly valid and commonly-used technique.

However, you could specify margins in em units if you wanted them to adjust to font size changes.