[vore]

I think the main bugbear of margins that the article doesn't mention is margin collapse: I personally don't find the rules super intuitive and I would rather just be explicit with spacing than have the browser collapse things together!

[jicea]

Agree, collapsing margins are counterintuitive, and only applied to top and bottom margin. It’s really surprising how many people don’t know it’s a thing and fight the box model. If you think you’re constantly fighting layout, try to read the MDN docs [1] with a fresh eye. I was guilty to think I needn’t learn CSS, and reading the MDN really help me.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS

[bhk]

What's really surprising is how many people do know that margin collapse is a thing, but haven't fully understood all of the implications, so they still get mystified by some unintended consequence.

I don't think that "go read all the MDN docs" is a very useful suggestion. More useful is something like the following, which I don't think you will find anywhere in MDN:

When an element's top or bottom margin collapses with its parent, this may affect the position of the parent, because the minimum of the child and parent's margin will be used to position the parent. (MDN says the child element's margin will fall "outside the parent", but it is not clear that it will be used during layout to place the parent.)

The bigger problem is that CSS is just so complicated and arbitrary. Consider the rule for collapsing margins with parents, from MDN:

> If there is no border, padding, inline part, block formatting context created, or clearance to separate the margin-top of a block from the margin-top of one or more of its descendant blocks; or no border, padding, inline content, height, or min-height to separate the margin-bottom of a block from the margin-bottom of one or more of its descendant blocks, then those margins collapse.

They list five different factors that prevent collapse, one of which ("block formatting context created") is a link to a page that defines it in terms of 15 different constructs or situations in CSS.

On top of that, it appears that the MDN text is in error, because it lists intervening "height" as something that prevents bottom margin collapse, but not top margin collapse (when in fact it does).

[cies]

This is according to me the real issue. Besides this unintuitive collapsability margins, there is only one difference between margin and padding: the edges/border of the background color.

It's the unintuitive collapsability that messes up margins.

[AltruisticGapHN]

See https://csswizardry.com/2012/06/single-direction-margin-decl...

[pcurve]

I almost feel it should be written out of the spec, because a lot of people still don't understand it, designers and developers. And design tools like Sketch or Figma will never implement it in their tools.

[jacobp100]

If you don’t want the margins to collapse, set the container to display: flex.

[scns]

One way around this is to only define margins at the end of the container.

[bhk]

Bottom margins can still collapse with those of a parent container.