The CSS Display property

How to work with the `display` property in CSS

The display property of an object determines how it is rendered by the browser.

It’s a very important property, and probably the one with the highest number of values you can use.

Those values include:

• block
• inline
• none
• contents
• flow
• flow-root
• table (and all the table-* ones)
• flex
• grid
• list-item
• inline-block
• inline-table
• inline-flex
• inline-grid
• inline-list-item

plus others you will not likely use, like ruby.

Choosing any of those will considerably alter the behavior of the browser with the element and its children.

In this post I’ll analyze the most important ones not covered elsewhere:

• block
• inline
• inline-block
• none

I cover others in separate posts:

• table in the Tables guide
• flex in the Flexbox guide
• grid in the CSS Grid guide

inline

Inline is the default display value for every element in CSS.

All the HTML tags are displayed inline out of the box except some elements like div, p and section, which are set as block by the user agent (the browser).

Inline elements don’t have any margin or padding applied.

Same for height and width.

You can add them, but the appearance in the page won’t change - they are calculated and applied automatically by the browser.

inline-block

Similar to inline, but with inline-block width and height are applied as you specified.

block

As mentioned, normally elements are displayed inline, with the exception of some elements, including

• div
• p
• section
• ul

which are set as block by the browser.

With display: block, elements are stacked one after each other, vertically, and every element takes up 100% of the page.

The values assigned to the width and height properties are respected, if you set them, along with margin and padding.

none

Using display: none makes an element disappear. It’s still there in the HTML, but just not visible in the browser.