Baseline shifts for block-level element when no content inside - html

Question

I'm working through a CSS problem at http://www.codecademy.com/courses/web-beginner-en-jNuXw/0/1?curriculum_id=50579fb998b470000202dc8b (actually, just helping a friend learn HTML/CSS) and came across a curious issue. If you erase the content in any of the <p> tags within a <div>, the div shifts upward. For example, delete the word 'Mom' without deleting the <p>. As best as I can figure out, this is because the element is set to vertical-align: baseline and for some reason the baseline is changing. I just can't figure out exactly why it's changing or what is causing it to change.
To be clear, I'm not asking for help to get the div's to align. That's simply a matter of setting their vertical-align to 'top'. I'm just trying to understand how the document flow is calculated. The specific question is: why does the empty div shift upwards?
DEMO: jsFiddle
UPDATE: Here is a new jsFiddle - http://jsfiddle.net/tonicboy/2DtTw/3/ which removes a lot of rules to boil the problem down to a simplified use case. From this, we can see that when a <p> tag has text in it, the baseline of the parent <div> is set at the baseline of the text. When you remove the text, the baseline of the parent <div> is set to the bottom of the <div>. Why is that?
HTML:
<div class="friend" id="best_friend"><p>Arthur</p></div>
<div class="friend"><p>Batmanuel</p></div>
<div class="friend"><p>Captain Liberty</p></div>
<div class="friend"><p>The City</p></div>
<div class="friend"><p>Justice</p></div>
<div class="family"><p></p></div>
<div class="family"><p>Dad</p></div>
<div class="family"><p>Bro</p></div>
<div class="family"><p>Sis</p></div>
<div class="family"><p>Rex</p></div>
<div class="enemy"><p>Baron Violent</p></div>
<div class="enemy"><p>The Breadmaster</p></div>
<div class="enemy"><p>The Deadly Nose</p></div>
<div class="enemy"><p>Dinosaur Neil</p></div>
<div class="enemy" id="archnemesis"><p>Chairface</p></div>
CSS:
div {
position: relative;
display: inline-block;
height: 100px;
width: 100px;
border-radius: 100%;
border: 2px solid black;
margin-left: 5px;
margin-top: 5px;
text-align: center;
}
div p {
position: relative;
margin-top: 40px;
font-size: 12px;
}
.friend {
border: 2px dashed green;
}
.family {
border: 2px dashed blue;
}
.enemy {
border: 2px dashed red;
}
#best_friend {
border: 4px solid #00C957;
}
#archnemesis {
border: 4px solid #cc0000;
}

Answer 1

I think I've mostly figured out the reason, after digging through W3C specs. Here are three key items from the spec which may explain this behavior:
"Line boxes that contain no text, no preserved white space, no inline elements with non-zero margins, padding, or borders, and no other in-flow content (such as images, inline blocks or inline tables), and do not end with a preserved newline must be treated as zero-height line boxes for the purposes of determining the positions of any elements inside of them, and must be treated as not existing for any other purpose."
When you delete the text, the <p> element is no longer in-flow.
"The baseline of an 'inline-block' is the baseline of its last line box in the normal flow, unless it has either no in-flow line boxes or if its 'overflow' property has a computed value other than 'visible', in which case the baseline is the bottom margin edge."
Because there are no in-flow elements within the parent div, the baseline becomes the bottom margin.
Because the div's are set to display: inline-block, their default vertical alignment is 'baseline'
Because the other div's have in-flow elements (the <p> tags), their baseline is set to the text baseline.
And that is why the empty box's bottom margin aligns with the baseline of the <p> tags in the other div's.

Answer 2

The baseline of the element is shifting because the text inside the <p> determs the baseline height:
In an inline formatting context, boxes are laid out horizontally, one
after the other, beginning at the top of a containing block.
Horizontal margins, borders, and padding are respected between these
boxes. The boxes may be aligned vertically in different ways: their
bottoms or tops may be aligned, or the baselines of text within them
may be aligned.
source: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html#block-formatting
The height of each inline-level box in the line box is calculated. For
replaced elements, inline-block elements, and inline-table elements,
this is the height of their margin box; for inline boxes, this is
their 'line-height'.
source: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visudet.html#line-height
CSS assumes that every font has font metrics that specify a
characteristic height above the baseline and a depth below it. In this
section we use A to mean that height (for a given font at a given
size) and D the depth. We also define AD = A + D, the distance from
the top to the bottom.
source: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visudet.html#inline-box-height
So with this block being a inline-block and baseline is calculted based on the line-height which is calcuted by different font types. Because this <p> has no font/text the baseline will not be positioned.
place all the line-height: 0; and you will see that the one with no text/font doesn't react like the other does:
jsFiddle
So why are the other two elemets shifting that have text in them?
Well it's because the text excist of two lines of text. The margin of the text is bigger and uses more space, thus the baseline is pushed further