Really intresting article…..see this….
Short answer: Yes, there is one more, “static”, which is the default. Yes, they majorly differ. Each of them is incredibily useful and which you should use of course depends on the desired result. Also, don’t forget about float, which is an important part of positioning.
An important concept to understand first is that every single element on a web page is a block. Literally a rectangle of pixels. This is easy to understand when when you set the element to display: block; or if that element is by default display: block; This means you can set a width and a height and that element will respect that. But elements that are display: inline, like a span by default, are also rectangles, they just flow onto the page different, lining up horizontally as they can.
Now that you are picturing every single page element as a block of pixels, How positioning is used to get the blocks of pixels exactly where you want them to go?
Short answer: Yes, there is one more, “static”, which is the default. Yes, they majorly differ. Each of them is incredibily useful and which you should use of course depends on the desired result. Also, don’t forget about float, which is an important part of positioning.
An important concept to understand first is that every single element on a web page is a block. Literally a rectangle of pixels. This is easy to understand when when you set the element to display: block; or if that element is by default display: block; This means you can set a width and a height and that element will respect that. But elements that are display: inline, like a span by default, are also rectangles, they just flow onto the page different, lining up horizontally as they can.
Now that you are picturing every single page element as a block of pixels, How positioning is used to get the blocks of pixels exactly where you want them to go?
- Static. This is the default for every single page element. Different elements don’t have different default values for positioning, they all start out as static. Static doesn’t mean much, it just means that the element will flow into the page as it normally would. The only reason you would ever set an element to position: static is to forcefully-remove some positioning that got applied to an element outside of your control. This is fairly rare, as positioning doesn’t cascade.
- Relative. This type of positioning is probably the most confusing and misused. What it really means is “relative to itself”. If you set position: relative; on an element but no other positioning attributes (top, left, bottom or right), it will no effect on it’s positioning at all, it will be exactly as it would be if you left it as position: static; But if you DO give it some other positioning attribute, say, top: 10px;, it will shift it’s position 10 pixels DOWN from where it would NORMALLY be. I’m sure you can imagine, the ability to shift an element around based on it’s regular position is pretty useful. I find myself using this to line up form elements many times that have a tendency to not want to line up how I want them to.
- Absolute. This is a very powerful type of positioning that allows you to literally place any page element exactly where you want it. You use the positioning attributes top, left bottom and right to set the location. Remember that these values will be relative to the next parent element with relative (or absolute) positioning. If there is no such parent, it will default all the way back up to the <html> element itself meaning it will be placed relatively to the page itself.
- Fixed. This type of positioning is fairly rare but certainly has its uses. A fixed position element is positioned relative to the viewport, or the browser window itself. The viewport doesn’t change when the window is scrolled, so a fixed positioned element will stay right where it is when the page is scrolled.
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