CSS: Decrypting CSS Margin, Border, and Padding Styles codes definitions

When working with ADF Faces skins, JSF inlineStyles, or just CSS in general, you may have come across some explicit style definitions like this which is very easy to understand:

padding-top: 15px;

However, you may have also come across more cryptic style definitions like these but wonder which measurement applies to which side of the element:

padding: 1px 2px 3px 4px;
padding: 5px 6px 7px;
padding: 8px 9px;
padding: 10px;

Here’s a key for decoding these definitions:

padding:   top   right   bottom   left;
padding:   top   right/left   bottom;
padding:   top/bottom   right/left;
padding:   top/bottom/right/left;

This same pattern applies to margins and borders.

Aside from the cryptic definitions, see my other post displaying how the CSS Box Model treats margins, borders, and padding with respect to width and height dimensions.  

If you are an ADF Faces application developer be sure to also read the Layout Basics page.

ADF: Direct ADF component skin appearance

Have you ever wanted to make an ADF Faces Rich Client component have a unique appearance but not change all other instances of that component? You can as long as the things you want to change are not skin properties or skin icons (server-side aspects like properties and icons are not part of the client-side generated style sheet so this client-side solution will not allow you to change them).

Let’s start with an interactive example; the skinning demo pages for the ADF Faces Rich Client:
http://jdevadf.oracle.com/adf-richclient-demo/components/skinningKeys/inputText.jspx

On this page, there is a right-hand side where you can see some example inputText components.  When you click on the checkboxes on the left-hand side of this page, the appearance of those start to change.  However, the inputText for the find field at the top of the page does not change.  This is because of some containment selector definitions in the skin used on this page that confines the custom styling to instances of the inputText that are contained in another component that has a particular style class.  Since the find field is not inside of that container, these custom styles do not apply to that field.

Let’s say your page has a structure like this:

<af:panelGroupLayout id="pgl1" layout="scroll" styleClass="SpecialMarker">
  <af:inputText id="it1" label="Name"/>
</af:panelGroupLayout>

To style that inputText specially in this container, you would create skinning definitions like this:

.SpecialMarker af|inputText {background-color:pink}
.SpecialMarker af|inputText::access-key {color: aqua;}
.SpecialMarker af|inputText::content {background-color:red}
.SpecialMarker af|inputText::label {font-weight: bold}

Alternatively, you could put your marker directly on the inputText like this:

<af:inputText id="it1" label="Name" styleClass="SpecialMarker"/>

and have skinning definitions like this:

af|inputText.SpecialMarker {background-color:pink}
af|inputText.SpecialMarker af|inputText::access-key {color: aqua;}
af|inputText.SpecialMarker af|inputText::content {background-color:red}
af|inputText.SpecialMarker af|inputText::label {font-weight: bold}