How to fix max-width and float:left interaction - html

Question

http://jsfiddle.net/Rncu6/
The green div has a max-width attribute, and it should shrink when the screen shrinks.
Instead, what happens is that the green div falls off to another line. If I try to remove the float:left on the green div, it suddenly overlaps with the yellow div, which is not what I want.
How do I fix this?

Answer 1

This seems like a really frustrating issue. The best way I can think to solve it is to remove float:left from p and replace it with display: table-cell.
p {
display: table-cell; /* replaces float:left */
max-width: 300px;
background-color: lightgreen;
height: 200px;
}
The only problem with this approach is that it will render all the margin attributes useless. To work around that, you can just add the inverse of those margin attributes to #img1. For example:
p { margin-left: 10px; }
Would be replaced with:
#img1 { margin-right: 10px; }
JS Fiddle Example
Caveat: I don't know how small you want your minimum width to become, but you'll notice that at a certain point the p will still move onto the next line. This is because it is becoming too small for individual words (e.g. longer words like "paragraph") to fit on one line. To work around that, you can use the word-break:break-all; attribute.
p { word-break: break-all }
That way, the width of p will continue to shrink until the width can no longer fit individual characters on one line.
JS Fiddle Example

Answer 2

Give width in percentages
#img1 {
background-color: yellow;
width: 20%;
height: 100px;
float: left;
}
p {
float:left;
margin-top: 0;
max-width: 50%;
background-color: lightgreen;
margin-left: 10px;
height: 200px;
}
http://jsfiddle.net/Rncu6/11/

Answer 3

The overlapping occurs because the size of the DOM is becomes larger than the browser so it gets pushed below the img div. As already mentioned you can use % to compensate for that. Although, if you want to absolutely define the divs in pixels until the browser can't display them any more.
To expand upon the current answer you could use Media queries...
#img1 {
background-color: yellow;
width: 100px;
height: 100px;
float: left;
}
p {
margin-top: 0;
float: left;
max-width: 300px;
background-color: lightgreen;
margin-left: 10px;
height: 200px;
}
p:after {
content: " ";
display: block;
height: 0;
clear: both;
}
#media screen and (max-width: 450px) {
#img1 {
width: 20%;
}
p {
max-width: 50%;
}
}
And here's the jsfiddle - http://jsfiddle.net/SxLCJ/