How wide is the default `<body>` margin?

html css margin
John picture John · Oct 29, 2012 · Viewed 34.3k times · Source

What’s the default margin that HTML sets for its <body> tag? I noticed that there’s some automatic margin, but I’m wondering if anyone knows how much it is (and whether it’s in px or %, etc.).

Answer

Jon Egeland picture Jon Egeland · Oct 29, 2012

In most major browsers, the default margin is 8px on all sides. It is defined in pixels by the user-agent-stylesheet your browser provides.

Some browsers allow you to create and use your own user-agent-stylesheet, but if you are developing a website, I would recommend staying away from changing this, since your users most likely will not have a modified stylesheet and would then see a different page than you do.

If you want to change it, you can just do this:

body {
  margin: 0px;
  padding: 0px;
  ...
}

But if you have a large project and want to be more complete, use normalize.css. It resets a lot of default values to be consistent across browsers.

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