Description
Display
I think of CSS like a choose your own adventure. When you have made certain choices, others become obvious. For example, you need to first choose your display type block, inline, inline-block, table. When you have chosen that, you are left with a tool-box of appropriate tools to use to alter the display. For example,
Block level elements should be used with margins, paddings, height and width. Line-height isn’t appropriate.
Inline elements have line-height, vertical align, and can also be whitespace sensitive. Margins, paddings, heights, and widths aren’t appropriate.
Tables have vertical and horizontal alignment and can sometimes behave bizarrely if you have one element of a table without the others (e.g. a table-row with no table-cell). Margins are inappropriate for table-rows and table-cells. Padding is inappropriate for tables and table rows.
If you stick to the tool box that naturally goes with your display type, you will have far fewer bugs and cross-browser differences.
Positioning
Next, if you chose block, you must choose your positioning mechanism. (The others are generally positioned according to the normal flow). So for blocks you can choose:
Float – brings blocks all the way to the right or left. If you floated something, you made it a block level element, which means previously applied vertical-align or line-height properties may no longer work.
Absolute – positions the element relative to it’s nearest position relative ancestor. Keep in mind that absolutely positioned elements do not trigger reflows and are not reflowed when ancestors and siblings are changed. This is a strength for animations, but can cause display issues if you use too much position absolute with dynamically updating content. (e.g. the old-school example is corners that do not move when more content is added to the box).
Static – the default, this is how you get back to a standard element in the normal flow.
Fixed – positions the block relative to the viewport. Rarely used.
Relative – mostly doesn’t affect the node it is applied to, but children will get their absolute position relative to this node.