It seems that many browsers style the <p> tag using margin instead of padding. This can easily mess up a background when put on a specific div. Instead of backgrounding the whole div you are often left with an annoying blank part at the top.

The obvious fix to this is.

p {margin:0px; padding:15px 0 0 0;}

Are there any situations where this would present a problem in the visual appearence webpage?

If no problems arise from this then does anyone know why browsers use margin instead of padding when it comes to <p>?

It seems that many browsers style the <p> tag using margin instead of padding.

No, as far as I know they all render the lowly <p> tag exactly the same way. A <p> is a block-level element.

Adding margin to the <P> should have no affect on the background of the div it sits in. That 'annoying blank part' is most likely due to margin collapse, which isn't a bug BTW, and can be solved by putting a 1px top padding on the containing div.