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CSS Element Sizing

While working on our new UI at $work we ran in to issues using the YUI layout manager as its very quirky and hard to customize. So, I ended up writing an entirely new layout manager. As part of this I found that the way I thought elements resized was nothing like reality. I’m a big jQuery fan so this diagram below refers to jQuery methods, but the concept applies to CSS in general.

As you can see the height of an element represent only the internal height of the element, not taking in to account the margin, border, or padding. This I already knew, but I didn’t know how the corresponding jQuery methods fit in here. jQuery.height() has the same value as the CSS height attribute. jQuery.innerHeight is the CSS height plus the CSS top and bottom padding. jQuery.outerHeight() includes the CSS height, the top and bottom padding, and the top and bottom border. And, finally, jQuery.outerHeight(true) works the same as jQuery.outerHeight(), but also includes the top and bottom margin.