Margins

This text is in a regular paragraph inside <p> tags. I've set the margin here to 5% for both margin-left and margin-right. That means that the text in my paragraphs will occupy the middle 90% of the page. The page in this case is the "parent" element.

This text is in a <blockquote>. The margins here are 20% for both margin-left and margin-right. I'd like to talk a little more about "parent elements". A parent element is the the next element up in the heirarchy of HTML tags. This <blockquote> and the paragraphs are all contained directly in the <body> element. If I, say put an <i> tag in this <blockquote>, its parent element would be <blockquote>, not <body>. That means its effected by both <blockquote>'s and <body>'s styling.

If you have a page with lots of quoted text, or big blocks of text you need emphasized, styling <blockquote> might be a good idea. We'll talk more about parent elements and "heredity" later.