Inline divs won't listen to authority - html

Question

I need a little bit of help disciplining my HTML. It seems to be acting up.
Anyway, the content area of a page I'm working on has two columns. To get the multi-column look, I'm not using one containing div for each column because some of the "rows" in the column need to be lined up.
So instead, I'm basically using several "rows" with two inline divs per row -- one for left content, one for right. Most of them are working correctly..but for some reason, my last row isn't. No matter what, it will not listen to me when I give it a width.
Here's what the relevent HTML looks like:
<div id="mainContainer">
<div id="topBar"></div> //full width
<div id="featured"> //this "row" is working fine
<div id="featuredVideos"></div> //these two
<div id="featuredLiterature"></div> //are inline
</div>
<div id="browseButtons"> //this is the "row" that is acting up
<div id="litBrowse"></div> //these two
<div id="vidBrowse"></div> //are inline
</div>
</div>
In the mean time, what types of situations can cause a div to not listen to a width? I even went so far as to give every single child div inside litbrowse and vidbrowse1 the same width that they have, 450px, and no dice. All of the content above it, which has essentially the exact same structure, is working fine. The only difference, maybe, is that the "row" above the row in question is comprised of two floating divs.
Here is a jsfiddle showing the issue. The bottom two divs (Browse lit by category, browse vids by category) should be spaced out, but they're scrunching together because they won't take their 450px width.

Answer 1

The problem is that you are saying that .browseBtn is inline. Inline elements don't take widths, only block level elements do.
Using inline-block instead will do what you want. It is inline enough to make the divs side by side and block enough to allow you to specify the width.
See http://jsfiddle.net/abtFr/2/

Answer 2

SECOND EDIT - Others have responded saying to use display: inline-block instead of display: inline. inline-block is not compatible with IE7. HOWEVER, we can make it compatible by appending
zoom:1;
*display: inline;
to the element using inline-block. To make compatible with IE6, you need to specify a height, so add
_height: [yourheight]px;
The underscore will target IE6 only.
Alternatively you can float the elements left, in which case my original reply may be relevant.
EDIT - I responded without seeing the jsFiddle; this response can probably be largely ignored.
To answer your question, floating an element will cause it to be taken out of the normal layout. If a div is floated left inside another div, it will be placed to the far left of that container, but its dimensions will not be taken into account when sizing that container div; in other words, that container will act like there are no divs inside.
To fix this you need to place another (empty) div inside the container, after the floating divs, and assign the style "clear: both" to it so that it will take the floating divs into account when being positioned. In turn, the container div will see the last cleared div and resize to take it into account.
Alternatively, sometimes you can skip adding the cleared div inside the container, and just add the style "overflow: hidden" to the container itself. This is somewhat of a hack, but a pretty robust one as far as hacks go.
Hope this solves your problem; if not we'll have to wait for more information.

Answer 3

It's simple, yes, you have a div, but you define its display as inline (with .browseBtn definition). So it's not a block-element anymore and it doesn't listen to width definition.
I've corrected the fiddle, although it might have other side effect.