Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps

2. position: relative

If you specify position:relative, then you can use top or bottom, and left or right to move the element relative to where it would normally occur in the document.

Let's move div-1 down 20 pixels, and to the left 40 pixels:

#div-1 {
 position:relative;
 top:20px;
 left:-40px;
}

Notice the space where div-1 normally would have been if we had not moved it: now it is an empty space. The next element (div-after) did not move when we moved div-1. That's because div-1 still occupies that original space in the document, even though we have moved it.

It appears that position:relative is not very useful, but it will perform an important task later in this tutorial.