At first glance, padding seems to have an effect identical to margins: It adds space around the element’s content. The difference is that padding sets the space between the border of the element and its content rather than between the element and the other elements in the window. Padding is useful when you’re using borders and background colors and don’t want the content butting right up to the edges. To set padding: 1. Start your declaration by typing the padding property name, followed by a colon (:) padding: 2. Type a value for the element’s padding.

What Is a Markup Language? HTML is used to mark up the structure of Web pages, but other markup languages are used by computers on the Web and beyond. The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is the grandfather of most markup languages used for print and the Internet. SGML is the international standard used to define the structures and appearance of documents. Multiple SGMLs have been created for a variety of document types and for various specialties—such as physics, accounting, and chemistry. HTML and XHTML are the Web’s primary version of SGML.

Most HTML tags have browser inherited styles associated with them. These default styles are actually defined by the Web browser developer. Because the browser developer has added them, you need to remember that they are there and will affect your design. For example, the tag will italicize text on most browsers. No cosmic constant dictates that emphasized text is italicized; it’s just that the guys and gals programming the browser software decided to do it that way. The good news is that you can use CSS to override the browser styles.