>padding pushes inward against interior content and margin pushes outward against exterior content.
That actually seems the wrong way round to me. If you think about a document, the margin is what separates text from the edge of the page (or interior padding, if you will). Padding, to me, implies an area around an element that other elements can't touch.
No, you're looking at it the wrong way. What you call the paper's margin is actually the paper's padding. Or better yet, when you are setting the margin of a document you are actually setting the margin of all the text on the document to the defined width.
That actually seems the wrong way round to me. If you think about a document, the margin is what separates text from the edge of the page (or interior padding, if you will). Padding, to me, implies an area around an element that other elements can't touch.