XHTML/CSS Padding on inline element with linebreak - xhtml

Question

I have an inline element with a line break in it. It has padding on all sides. However, the side padding on where the line break cuts the element is not there.
This is what i mean:
http://jsfiddle.net/4Gs2E/
There should be 20px padding on the right of tag and left of with but there isnt.
The only other way I can see this working is if i create a new element for every line but this content will be dynamically generated and will not be in a fixed width container so i dont see that working out. Is there any other way I can do this in css without any javascript?
I want the final result to look like this :
http://jsfiddle.net/GNsw3/
but without any extra elements
i also need this to work with display inline only as I want the background to wrap around the text as inline block doesnt do this
Is this possible?
edit, altered the examples to make what i want more visible:
current
http://jsfiddle.net/4Gs2E/2/
what i want it to look like
http://jsfiddle.net/GNsw3/1/

Answer 1

In some cases you can use box-shadow for a workaround.
Move the right and left padding of the element to its parent and add two box-shadows.
The result: http://jsfiddle.net/FpLCt/1/
Browser support for box-shadow: http://caniuse.com/css-boxshadow
Update:
There is also a new css property for this issue called box-decoration-break. It is currently only supported by opera, but hopefully more browsers will implement this soon.
Hope this helps

Answer 2

Found a solution for you, but it ain't pretty :)
Since you can't target the <br> element with css, you have to use javascript. Here's how you can accomplish what you want with jQuery:
// Add two spaces before and after any <br /> tag
$('br').replaceWith(' <br /> ');
Play with the number of elements to acheive your padding on both ends.
Here's an updated Fiddle demo:
http://jsfiddle.net/4Gs2E/8/

Answer 3

Maybe you can use float: left instead of display: inline:
http://jsfiddle.net/GolezTrol/4Gs2E/1/

Answer 4

Usually that is implemented by wrapping each word in an own SPAN which has border.

Answer 5

I just wanted to make css-animated menu for myself. Workaround I have found is to wrap your INLINE-BLOCK element (change in css if necessary, lets call it a span with such an attribute for purpose of this solution) into block element. Then I'm using margins of span as it was padding for the surrounding div.
div.menuopt {
margin: 10px;
padding: 0px;
padding-left: 0px;
overflow: hidden;
width: 500px;
height: 150px;
background: grey;
}
span.menuopt {
display: inline-block;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
margin-left: 150px;
margin-top: 10px;
font-size: 25px;
}
Example:
http://jsfiddle.net/ApbQS/
hope it will help anyone