Here is a long paragraph of text. Think of it as a long, thin snake contained within the paragraph's box. The paragraph element contains the text, but CSS also applies a box around the text itself, and it is this inner box to which the text properties are applied. In this example, the containing element's box is in red and the inner box around the text is in green. As you can see from the way the inner box is drawn, CSS sees the text as one long strip, even though the width of the container causes it to be broken across several lines.

A code example from Stylin’ with CSS, Third Edition by Charles Wyke-Smith. Visit stylinwithcss.com for more CSS information and updates.