Best solution for horizontal alignment in a webpage? - html

Question

friends,
I decided to ask this because I've seen many answers on the internet, but no one seems to be a definitive answer.
In out HTML documents we have many elements one inside another. Eventually we'll want to add paddings and margins to these elements.
So, what if we want to have all content horizontally aligned to the center of the page? If the content has 1000px of width and the screen resolution will change from device to device, the most common solution is something like (will work on netscape based browsers):
body{
width: 100%;
}
#content{
width: 1000px;
margin: 0 auto;
}
But if we have lots of other elements inside the #content element, like a table made of DIV elements, we start to face some problems. The parent's height will not adjust to its children's height and padding and margin will not work properly (if we inspect the element we will see that the width and height is not behaving as expected) unless we add some new rules.
I use float: left but then the headache starts! When I add float: left only those elements will work fine, but the parents will not. If I add float: left to an element that already has margin: 0 auto set, it will no longer be aligned to the center of the page...
I've seen some solutions using text-align: center to the parent and display: inline-block; float: none; to the element we want to be aligned to the center. But it also has many problems (for example, we can't set the float rule)
How do you deal with this problem guys?

Answer 1

You need to use clear after you use float on elements in order to 'clear the floats' and make the height propagate up to its parents. You can use clear:left (or right) to just clear float:left elements but typically it's fine to just use clear:both.
In the below example there are two versions of clearfixes, one that uses a pseudo-element on the container and another that is just another element.
Demo
HTML
<div id="content">
<nav>
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>Second</li>
<li>Third</li>
</ul>
</nav>
<div class="float-me">Test1</div>
<div class="float-me">Test2</div>
<div class="clear"></div>
</div>
CSS
#content {
width: 500px;
margin: 0 auto;
}
li {
float:left;
}
/* our pseudo-element clearfix */
ul:after {
display: block;
content: "";
clear: both;
}
.float-me {
float:left;
}
.clear {
clear:both;
}