Up till (relatively) recently, I had a major gripe with HTML & CSS. I couldn’t find a proper, efficient, semantic way to center align left floated elements.
Gee, what a mouthful, even writing about it gets me edgy.
Of course there were ways, but I couldn’t sympathise with any of them. I, for example, always stumbled upon this problem while styling pagination links for galleries and image carousels.
Then came the day when display: inline-block became famous and, as by magic, everything changed. After a bit of tinkering, I found an efficient and (mostly) cross-browser way to center elements, without resolving to floats.
You can follow the technique below or skip directly to the witty, quick & dirty demo I’ve come up with. Go on, I dare you.
T3h HTML
So what do we have here? Nothing too fancy, just a simple unordered list:
T3h CSS, take #1
So we want this list centered, with each element neatly next to its previous. OK, let’s get down to business:
ul {
margin: 20px;
padding: 0;
list-style-type: none;
text-align: center;
}
li {
display: inline-block;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
list-style-type: none;
}
li a {
text-decoration: none;
color: #555;
padding: 4px 6px;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
margin: 0 4px;
}
li a:hover {
border: 1px solid #999;
color: #333;
background-color: #f2f2f2;
}
Wee! Looks cool. Now the tricky part: let’s start the browser testing…
(5 minutes later)
Phew! Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer 8 seem to be working fine with it!
And Internet Explorer 6 and 7… Well…
Let’s say they don’t love inline-block to bits.
T3h CSS, take #2
Hmmm… How about turning display: inline-block to display: inline? Internet Explorer loves display: inline! And maybe a little of this trusty ole jar of hasLayout cream we always have available on our web-des shelf. Let’s add a zoom: 1 declaration to li as and see what happens (I used the star and the star-plus hack to target IE6 and IE7 only, but in real life designs, you really should use conditional stylesheets):
* html li { display: inline; }
*+html li { display: inline; }
li a {
text-decoration: none;
color: #555;
padding: 4px 6px;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
margin: 0 4px;
zoom: 1;
}
Tada! Mission accomplished. Pat yourself at the back and go get a cup of tea, you’ve deserved it.
Disclaimer: I don’t claim this will work in older versions of proper browsers (namely, Firefox 2 or Safari 2 or yada yada). Frankly, I don’t care, and neither should you. It works fine for the occasion here and there when you want to center stuff. If you have a better / cleaner solution, I’d be glad to hear all about it in the comments.
24 comments on this post
Chris Georgakopoulos #1
13.May.09
gz!
Patternhead #2
14.May.09
Nice tip and great explanation
Mike #3
14.May.09
Ah very nice, thank you.
Sanjeev Sharma #4
14.May.09
great trick… this will surely come handy. thanks for sharing!!
Giorgos #5
28.May.09
The LI elements are very useful (as i inspected)!
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Gonzalo #22
1.Mar.12
Beau-ti-full
thx
asrar #23
15.Apr.12
y not use only display:inline in li.. which works fine in all browsers
Sugar #24
17.Apr.12
@asrar
Hey, thanks for your comment. Why use display:inline though, when you can use display:inline-block in most modern browsers to get the effect you want?
Inline-block is such an under-used CSS trick, I’m quite surprised.