Search Bar Padding/Sizing Issues HTML - css

Question

I'm having trouble with a search box. There are two main issues that I'm having. Firstly, I have tried to create a search bar within a navigation bar and the search bar doesnt match the other elements within the navigation bar.
As you can see, the padding does not match the other elements and the size of the box is off by a couple of pixels.
Secondly, the search box looks fine when the page is maximised (besides the problems mentioned above). However, when the page is not maximised, it does this:
I know these are probably rookie errors and the code is probably sloppy but I'm a university student and this is my first HTML project. I am using XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.0 as we arent allowed to use CSS3 or HTML 5 or any scripting languages. If someone could help me out, I'd greatly appreciate it!
This is the HTML code:
<div id="nav_bar">
<div id="inner_nav_bar">
<ul>
<li>home</li>
<li>phones</li>
<li>order</li>
<li>faq's</li>
<li>contact us</li>
<li id="search">Search: <input type="text" /> <input type="submit" value="Go!"></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
This is my CSS code:
#inner_nav_bar
{
text-align:center;
}
#nav_bar ul
{
list-style-type:none;
padding:0;
overflow:hidden;
}
#nav_bar li
{
display: inline;
}
#nav_bar a:link,a:visited
{
display:inline-block;
width:120px;
font-weight:bold;
color:#FFFFFF;
background-color:#27c645;
padding:4px;
text-decoration:none;
text-transform:uppercase;
border-style:solid;
border-width:3px;
border-color:#0d6e1f;
text-align:center;
}
#search
{
display:inline-block;
font-weight:bold;
color:#FFFFFF;
background-color:#27c645;
padding:5px;
text-decoration:none;
text-transform:uppercase;
border-style:solid;
border-width:3px;
border-color:#0d6e1f;
text-align:center;
}
#nav_bar a:hover,a:active
{
background-color:#7A991A;
}

Answer 1

In your CSS, you're treating the #search list item very different from the other list items.
I changed many of the lines in the CSS around, so that most of the properties are now in li and don't have to be repeated in the other elements.
One problem was the a elements in the other list items, that had vertical padding. I replaced that with line-height.
#inner_nav_bar {
text-align:center;
}
#nav_bar ul {
list-style-type:none;
padding:0;
overflow:hidden;
}
#nav_bar li {
text-transform:uppercase;
display: inline-block;
white-space:nowrap;
color:#FFFFFF;
background-color:#27c645;
border:3px solid #0d6e1f;
text-align:center;
font-weight:bold;
line-height:1.66;
}
#nav_bar a {
display:inline-block;
width:120px;
color:#FFFFFF;
text-decoration:none;
padding:0 4px;
}
#search {
padding:0 4px;
}
#search input {margin:0;}
#nav_bar a:hover, #nav_bar a:focus, #nav_bar a:active {
background-color:#7A991A;
}
Another problem was the size of the input element. The only way I could get that right with any kind of browser consistency was to increase the line height. If that is not acceptable, you may have to set the height on the list items explicitly, and add overflow:hidden.
See result in jsFiddle.
PS you also had other errors: One input didn't end with />, which is mandatory for XHTML. And you had #nav_bar a:link,a:visited, which did not do what you wanted; you should hae written #nav_bar a:link, #nav_bar a:visited otherwise the style would have applied to all visited links, not just the ones in #nav_bar.