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margin property

Sets or retrieves the width of the top, right, bottom, and left margins of the object.

Syntax

margin: top | right | bottom | left

Property values

A variable of type String that specifies or receives up to four of the following space-delimited values:

top: Any of the range of margin width values available to the margin-top property.
right: Any of the range of margin width values available to the margin-right property.
bottom: Any of the range of margin width values available to the margin-bottom property.
left: Any of the range of margin width values available to the margin-left property.

CSS information

Applies To	All elements
Media	visual
Inherited	no
Initial Value

Standards information

CSS 2.1, Section 5.5.5

Remarks

This is a composite property that specifies up to four width values, in the following order: top, right, bottom, left. If one width value is specified, it is used for all four sides. If two width values are specified, the first is used for the top and bottom borders, and the second is used for left and right borders. If three width values are specified, they are used for the top, right/left, and bottom borders, respectively. Negative margins are supported except for top and bottom margins on inline objects.

As of Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0, you can specify length values relative to the height of the element's font (em) or the height of the letter "x" (ex).

In Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0, the specified margin value is added to the default value of the object. In Internet Explorer 4.0 or later, the margin value is absolute. The margin properties do not work with the td and tr objects in Internet Explorer 4.0, but they do work in Internet Explorer 3.0. To set margins in the cell for Internet Explorer 4.0 or later, apply the margin to an object, such as div or p, within the td.

As of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5, this property applies to inline elements. With earlier versions of Windows Internet Explorer, inline elements must have an absolute position or layout to use this property. Element layout is set by providing a value for the height property or the width property.

For inline elements, the top and bottom values are used to compute the border area of a surrounding inline element, if present. These values do not contribute to the height of a line.

Margins are always transparent.

Examples

The following examples use the margin attribute and the margin property to change the margin of the object.

This example uses the img object as a selector to set the margin of images to 1 centimeter.

Code example: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/samples/author/dhtml/refs/margin_h.htm


<STYLE>
    IMG { margin:1cm }
</STYLE>

This example uses inline scripting to set the margin of the image to 5 millimeters when an onmouseover event occurs.

Code example: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/samples/author/dhtml/refs/margin_s.htm


<IMG src="sphere.jpg" onmouseover="this.style.margin='5mm'">

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