White space at top of page

Add a css reset to the top of your website style sheet, different browsers render some default margin and padding and perhaps external style sheets do something you are not aware of too, a css reset will just initialize a fresh palette so to speak:

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre, a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code, del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp, small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var, b, u, i, center, dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li, fieldset, form, label, legend, caption {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    border: 0;
    outline: 0;
    font-size: 100%;
    vertical-align: baseline;
    background: transparent;
}

UPDATE: Use the Universal Selector Instead: @Frank mentioned that you can use the Universal Selector: * instead of listing all the elements, and this selector looks like it is cross browser compatible in all major browsers:

* {
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0;
        border: 0;
        outline: 0;
        font-size: 100%;
        vertical-align: baseline;
        background: transparent;
    }

If nothing of the above helps, check if there is margin-top set on some of the (some levels below) nested DOM element(s).

It will be not recognizable when you inspect body element itself in the debugger. It will only be visible when you unfold several elements nested down in body element in Chrome Dev Tools elements debugger and check if there is one of them with margin-top set.

The below is the upper part of a site screen shot and the corresponding Chrome Dev Tools view when you inspect body tag.

No sign of top margin here and you have resetted all the browser-scpecific CSS properties as per answers above but that unwanted white space is still here.

The unwanted white space above the body element The corresponding debugger view

The following is a view when you inspect the right nested element. It is clearly seen the orange'ish top-margin is set on it. This is the one that causes the white space on top of body element.

Clearly visible top-margin enter image description here

On that found element replace margin-top with padding-top if you need space above it and yet not to leak it above the body tag.

Hope that helps :)

Old question, but I just ran into this. Sometimes your files are UTF-8 with a BOM at the start, and your template engine doesn't like that. So when you include your template, you get another (invisible) BOM inserted into your page...

<body>{INVISIBLE BOM HERE}...</body>

This causes a gap at the start of your page, where the browser renders the BOM, but it looks invisible to you (and in the inspector, just shows up as whitespace/quotes.

Save your template files as UTF-8 without BOM, or change your template engine to correctly handle UTF8/BOM documents.

Aside from the css reset, I also added the following to the css of my div container and that fixed it.

position: relative;
top: -22px;

White space at top of page

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