# CSS box model

> In web development, the CSS box model refers to how HTML elements are modeled in browser engines and how the dimensions of those HTML elements are derived from CSS properties. It is a fundamental concept for the composition of HTML webpages. The guidelines of the box model are described by web standards World Wide Web [&hellip;]

In web development, the **CSS box model** refers to how HTML elements are modeled in browser engines and how the dimensions of those HTML elements are derived from CSS properties. It is a fundamental concept for the composition of HTML webpages. The guidelines of the box model are described by web standards World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifically the CSS Working Group. For much of the late-1990s and early 2000s there had been non-standard compliant implementations of the box model in mainstream browsers. With the advent of CSS2 in 1998, which introduced the `box-sizing` property, the problem had mostly been resolved.

## Specifics

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specification describes how elements of web pages are displayed by graphical browsers. Section 4 of the CSS1 specification defines a “formatting model” that gives block-level elements—such as `p` and `blockquote`—a width and height, and three levels of boxes surrounding it: padding, borders, and margins. While the specification never uses the term “box model” explicitly, the term has become widely used by web

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*Source: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_box_model)*

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## Metadata

- **URL:** https://wpsearchai.com/css-box-model/
- **Published:** 2026-01-28T18:49:47+00:00
- **Modified:** 2026-01-28T18:49:47+00:00
- **Author:** admin
- **Categories:** Web development
