CSS table layout: why does table-row not accept a margin?

Solution 1:

See the CSS 2.1 standard, section 17.5.3. When you use display:table-row, the height of the DIV is solely determined by the height of the table-cell elements in it. Thus, margin, padding, and height on those elements have no effect.

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/tables.html

Solution 2:

How's this for a work around (using an actual table)?

table {
    border-collapse: collapse;
}

tr.row {
    border-bottom: solid white 30px; /* change "white" to your background color */
}

It's not as dynamic, since you have to explicitly set the color of the border (unless there's a way around that too), but this is something I'm experimenting with on a project of my own.

Edit to include comments regarding transparent:

tr.row {
    border-bottom: 30px solid transparent;
}

Solution 3:

The closest thing I've seen would be to set border-spacing: 0 30px; to the container div. However, this just leaves me with space on the upper edge of the table, which defeats the purpose, since you wanted margin-bottom.

Solution 4:

Have you tried setting the bottom margin to .row div, i.e. to your "cells"? When you work with actual HTML tables, you cannot set margins to rows, too - only to cells.

Solution 5:

There is a pretty simple fix for this, the border-spacing and border-collapse CSS attributes work on display: table.

You can use the following to get padding/margins in your cells.

.container {
  width: 850px;
  padding: 0;
  display: table;
  margin-left: auto;
  margin-right: auto;
  border-collapse: separate;
  border-spacing: 15px;
}

.row {
  display: table-row;
}

.home_1 {
  width: 64px;
  height: 64px;
  padding-right: 20px;
  margin-right: 10px;
  display: table-cell;
}

.home_2 {
  width: 350px;
  height: 64px;
  padding: 0px;
  vertical-align: middle;
  font-size: 150%;
  display: table-cell;
}

.home_3 {
  width: 64px;
  height: 64px;
  padding-right: 20px;
  margin-right: 10px;
  display: table-cell;
}

.home_4 {
  width: 350px;
  height: 64px;
  padding: 0px;
  vertical-align: middle;
  font-size: 150%;
  display: table-cell;
}

<div class="container">
  <div class="row">
    <div class="home_1">Foo</div>
    <div class="home_2">Foo</div>
    <div class="home_3">Foo</div>
    <div class="home_4">Foo</div>
  </div>

  <div class="row">
    <div class="home_1">Foo</div>
    <div class="home_2">Foo</div>
  </div>
</div>

Note that you have to have

border-collapse: separate;

Otherwise it will not work.