Text - Padding or Margins

[Scriptage]

Or 100% logic if you follow the box model rules:Box model.

[zumojuice]

I was talking coding in general

[james]

*votes*

for fun

[Scriptage]

I was talking coding in general

Me too.

[graphicsAZ]

I use padding on a DIV for paragraph text and margin to position the DIV that holds it, so yeah I guess that is the box model. If is just text on one line then I will use line-height.

[SineQuaNon]

Totally depends on the context in which it's being used. For example, if you apply 10px of padding to an <a> tag, the clickable area becomes larger -- which may or may not be the desired effect depending on your context.

[lloydvincent]

It always depends on what you want to do.

I think the basic idea is to use padding when you want to make an element bigger, and margin when you want to move the element away from the things around it. But for me padding and margin always seem to require some trial and error to get it right (I recently discovered just how magical Firebug can be for this particular work).

If you have a background color, I believe the color will cover the padding area but not the margin area (unless you specify dimensions explicitly).