Removing body margin in CSS

Some HTML elements have predefined margins (namely: body, h1 to h6, p, fieldset, form, ul, ol, dl, dir, menu, blockquote and dd).

In your case it's the h1 causing your problem. It has { margin: .67em } by default. If you set it to 0 it will remove the space.

To solve problems like these generally, I recommend using your browser's dev tools. For most browsers: right-click on the element you want to know more about and select "Inspect Element". In the "Styles" tab, at the very bottom, you have a CSS box-model. This is a great tool for visualising borders, padding and margins and what elements are the root of your styling headaches.

I would say that using:

* {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

is a bad way of solving this.

The reason for the h1 margin popping out of the parent is that the parent does not have a padding.

If you add a padding to the parent element of the h1, the margin will be inside the parent.

Resetting all paddings and margins to 0 can cause a lot of side effects. Then it's better to remove margin-top for this specific headline.