Here's presentation of the issue. Clicking on "content" square toggles display: table-cell on the pre-content div. In IE10 and FF24 it does not make the red line visible at all, while in chrome 30 it does.
I'm trying to create dockable panel on full-window application which either floats on top, either is one of the two columns, and I'm docking the panel by switching classes: either one with position: absolute, either one with display: table-cell.
Why is there such a difference in behaviour? Any ideas how to fix this?
It appears to be caused by your #pre-content divider being displayed as block by default. For some reason this has 11px width (I'm not sure why, however).
I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve, but can you not simply set this to not display at all by default instead?
#pre-content:not(.table-cell) {
display: none;
}
JSFiddle demo.
Note that I've had to use the not() selector here as IDs have higher specificity than classes, and #pre-content would override .table-cell.
When you set a button element to display:block it dominates its vertical space like a block while still calculating its size based on its contents like an inline-block. This seems like a really useful behavior. Is it possible to make other elements behave this way?
Example
I can accomplish a similar method of display using floats and clears, but it causes havoc on nearby content that isn't tailored to it.
I can accomplish it more sanely by wrapping each element and making the outer element display:block while the inner element is display:inline-block. This requires extra markup though.
Sounds like you want display: table.
Such a “table” shrinks to just fit its content, and if the content is not a display: table-row or display: table-cell then it is just treated as if it were inside a single-cell table. You can also center it horizontally using auto margins.
I changed block to table in your example and it did exactly what I think you want.
(If you've thinking about the advice “don't use tables for layout” — that is referring to using tables written in HTML markup, not any CSS facilities.)
Since I am having trouble with Firefox about positioning a block element by nature (header) to be inline by using display:run-in; i'm asking you for your help ! been searching for quite some time now and I cant find which CSS method could be used instead of just applying display:run-in; to the element, which is supported in all the major browsers. It is crucial that i position the element this way.
Anyone knows a method how to do this ?
If you'd like to display your element as a block element, but would position it inline, then
display: inline-block;
will do the trick for you.
The MDN still lists run-in as an experimental value, so we shouldn't be too surprised if it doesn't fully function in Firefox at this time.
As for options, there are at least two you could use: display: inline and display: inline-block.
Inline might suffice if you don't need the properties of a block element on your header. Inline-block keeps it as a block element, so you can still do nice things like give it width, height, margin and so on.
View them on JSFiddle.
Alright i found a solution ! :) Using display:inline; in a combination with float:left; will make a block element by nature use space only as much as he needs, not full 100% of its parent element.
There is just one problem with this tecnhique if you are using bigger font for lets say a heading and want to add a paragraph right after it (on the same line). If the headings font-size is a bit bigger, heading could take 2 or even more lines of space in height where paragraphs text should be,and you will have a small gap between header and another row of paragraph under it. The solution is to add display:block; and margin-top:Xpx; to the paragraph element to align it as needed.
My Question(s)
Are any of these methods preferred by a professional web designer?
Are any of these methods prefereed by a web browser when drawing the website?
Is this all just personal preference?
Are there other techniques I'm missing?
Note: Above questions are in regards to designing a multi-column layout
float:left;
http://jsfiddle.net/CDe6a/
This is the method I always use when creating column layouts, and it seems to work just fine. The parent does collapse on itself though, so you just need to remember to clear:both; afterwards. Another con that I just found was the inability to align text vertically.
display:inline;
This seems to correct the problem of the collapsing parent, but adds whitespace.
http://jsfiddle.net/CDe6a/1/
Removing whitespace from html seems to be the easiest fix this problem, but is not desired if you are really picky about your html.
http://jsfiddle.net/CDe6a/2/
display:inline-block;
Seems to behave exactly like display:inline;.
http://jsfiddle.net/CDe6a/3/
display:table-cell;
http://jsfiddle.net/CDe6a/4/
Works perfect.
My thoughts:
I'm sure I'm missing a ton of stuff, like certain exceptions that will break the layout but, display:table-cell; seems to work the best, and I think I will start replacing float:left; as I always seem to mess up on clear:both;. I've read many articles and blogs about this on the web, but none of them give me a definite answer on what I should use when laying out my website.
Of the options you asked about:
float:left;
I dislike floats because of the need to have additional markup to clear the float. As far as I'm concerned, the whole float concept was poorly designed in the CSS specs. Nothing we can do about that now though. But the important thing is it does work, and it works in all browsers (even IE6/7), so use it if you like it.
The additional markup for clearing may not be necessary if you use the :after selector to clear the floats, but this isn't an option if you want to support IE6 or IE7.
display:inline;
This shouldn't be used for layout, with the exception of IE6/7, where display:inline; zoom:1 is a fall-back hack for the broken support for inline-block.
display:inline-block;
This is my favourite option. It works well and consistently across all browsers, with a caveat for IE6/7, which support it for some elements. But see above for the hacky solution to work around this.
The other big caveat with inline-block is that because of the inline aspect, the white spaces between elements are treated the same as white spaces between words of text, so you can get gaps appearing between elements. There are work-arounds to this, but none of them are ideal. (the best is simply to not have any spaces between the elements)
display:table-cell;
Another one where you'll have problems with browser compatibility. Older IEs won't work with this at all. But even for other browsers, it's worth noting that table-cell is designed to be used in a context of being inside elements that are styled as table and table-row; using table-cell in isolation is not the intended way to do it, so you may experience different browsers treating it differently.
Other techniques you may have missed? Yes.
Since you say this is for a multi-column layout, there is a CSS Columns feature that you might want to know about. However it isn't the most well supported feature (not supported by IE even in IE9, and a vendor prefix required by all other browsers), so you may not want to use it. But it is another option, and you did ask.
There's also CSS FlexBox feature, which is intended to allow you to have text flowing from box to box. It's an exciting feature that will allow some complex layouts, but this is still very much in development -- see http://html5please.com/#flexbox
I usually use float: left; and add overflow: auto; to solve the collapsing parent problem (as to why this works, overflow: auto will expand the parent instead of adding scrollbars if you do not give it explicit height, overflow: hidden works as well). Most of the vertical alignment needs I had are for one-line of text in menu bars, which can be solved using line-height property. If I really need to vertical align a block element, I'd set an explicit height on the parent and the vertically aligned item, position absolute, top 50%, and negative margin.
The reason I don't use display: table-cell is the way it overflows when you have more items than the site's width can handle. table-cell will force the user to scroll horizontally, while floats will wrap the overflow menu, making it still usable without the need for horizontal scrolling.
The best thing about float: left and overflow: auto is that it works all the way back to IE6 without hacks, probably even further.
I'd say it depends on what you need it for:
If you need it just to get 3 columns layout, I'd suggest to do it with float.
If you need it for menu, you can use inline-block. For the whitespace problem, you can use few tricks as described by Chris Coyier here http://css-tricks.com/fighting-the-space-between-inline-block-elements/.
If you need to make a multiple choice option, which the width needs to spread evenly inside a specified box, then I'd prefer display: table. This will not work correctly in some browsers, so it depends on your browser support.
Lastly, what might be the best method is using flexbox. The spec for this has changed few times, so it's not stable just yet. But once it has been finalized, this will be the best method I reckon.
I prefer inline-block, although float is also useful. Table-cell isn't rendered correctly by old IEs (neither does inline-block, but there's the zoom: 1; *display: inline hack that I use frequently). If you have children that have a smaller height than their parent, floats will bring them to the top, whereas inline-block will screw up sometimes.
Most of the time, the browser will interpret everything correctly, unless, of course, it's IE. You always have to check to make sure that IE doesn't suck-- for example, the table-cell concept.
In all reality, yes, it boils down to personal preference.
One technique you could use to get rid of white space would be to set a font-size of 0 to the parent, then give the font-size back to the children, although that's a hassle, and gross.
For the record only, to add to Spudley's answer, there is also the possibility to use position: absolute and margins if you know the column widths.
For me, the main issue when chossing a method is whether you need the columns to fill the whole height (equal heights), where table-cell is the easiest method (if you don't care much for older browsers).
I prefer inline-block, but float are still useful way to put together HTML elemenets, specially when we have elements which one should stick to the left and one to the right, float working better with writing less lines, while inline-block working well in many other cases.
I have emoticons in a css sprite image that I want to display within text, so I have spans inserted with background definitions but as these spans are inline elements I can not define the width and height.
The only thing I could think of is make them block elements and float left, but I'm not sure if this is the best approach. What do you think is the best way to do this?
try to use the css property and value display: inline-block
I do not think that display: inline-block is supported enough to rely on. Obviously I am talking about <=IE7, and possibly other mobile devices. Which unfortunately are still in use. However there comes a point when one stops supporting IE.
I would try using a div floated, with background attributes set. Failing that a single image.