What does the following do:
<div style="clear:both"></div>
and how is it used?
It will 'clear' any floated elements that appear above it in the HTML source. If you have floated elements within a container element, the container will have a height of 0 and the floated elements will 'spill out'. Clearing them will allow the container to assume the correct height.
See here for a much better explanation.
It's made to avoid float elements to keep on floating after this div. In my opinion using this is a bad idea and it's better to use a clearfix on the wrapping div containing the floating elements.
In case you have float elements, a clear:both will not wrap around them, but will be displayed after them. In a way, this resets floating.
clear:both is also useful for giving an element the height of its floating children - without it the element would be smaller than its children, which is unattractive.
A less common use it to fix IE6 problems, where it doesn't display the page properly. Sometimes elements are rendered behind the background color, and clear:both can fix it.
Related
I have a minor CSS issue. This is the website. As you can see, the div at the bottom overflows. How do I fix it? I suppose it's just a CSS rule I have to add/change. Thanks
Apply:
overflow:hidden;
to site_content_large_div
...or, if you want the div to grow with its contents, and for its container to work properly, then remove the height value applied to site_content_container_div, and apply a clearfix to the same, so that it's enclosed, floated elements will contribute to its calculated height.
Clearfix solves a common problem with float-based layouts, so it's best to create a separate, reusable class for this fix that you can apply to any element containing floats that need to be entirely visually contained.
This article provides all the necessary code: http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/09/27/clearfix-reloaded-overflowhidden-demystified/
I'm pretty CSS-savvy, but I'm seeing some odd float/clear behavior. I have it working, but I'm not entirely sure why and am looking for an explanation.
JSFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/ismyrnow/JV5n6/
I have a 2 column layout - sidebar and content - where the sidebar is floated but the content is not; the content div has a left margin applied to it.
If I use clear:both on any elements in the content div, the element unexpectedly drops below the height of the sidebar div (unexpectedly because the floated sidebar isn't directly affecting the positioning of items inside the content area).
What is even more unexpected, is that when I add overflow:auto to the content div, the problem goes away. (I found the solution here)
Can someone explain:
Why clear:both would cause an element to clear a floated element that isn't directly affecting its position.
Why overflow:auto on the parent element fixes the issue.
Why clear:both would cause an element to clear a floated element that isn't directly affecting its position.
It may not be directly affecting its position, but it would still have affected it anyway, because in the absence of any clearance, floats aren't normally restricted in how they affect the rest of the normal flow layout even once they are taken out of it, not even by different parent elements such as your .b content element with the left margin in this case. The only real restriction is that floating elements may only affect elements that come after them in document tree order, i.e. elements that are following (not preceding) siblings, as well as their descendants.
The content that's just above the element within your content column isn't tall enough to push it beneath the floated element. If you remove that declaration, you would see that both .c elements become positioned next to their respective floats as well.
When you add clear, what happens is that it forces the clearing element to be positioned beneath the float regardless of where it ends up horizontally.
Why overflow:auto on the parent element fixes the issue.
This is because any block boxes with overflow other than visible generate block formatting contexts. A property of a block formatting context is that floating boxes outside it can never interact with any boxes inside it, and vice versa.
Once you cause the content element to establish its own block formatting context, your floating element is no longer able to affect any elements inside the content element (see the section on the float property), and the clearing element inside it is no longer able to clear any floats that are outside the content element (see the clear property).
For clear:both
The clear CSS property specifies whether an element can be next to floating elements that precede it or must be moved down (cleared) below them.
The clear property applies to both floating and non-floating elements.
When applied to non-floating blocks, it moves the border edge of the element down until it is below the margin edge of all relevant floats. This movement (when it happens) causes margin collapsing not to occur.
When applied to floating elements, it moves the margin edge of the element below the margin edge of all relevant floats. This affects the position of later floats, since later floats cannot be positioned higher than earlier ones.
The floats that are relevant to be cleared are the earlier floats within the same block formatting context.
I hope this will clear your doubt.
This is the link from where i found the above info.....
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/clear
I have two <div>s inside a parent <div>. Both the inner ones are styled with no padding, border or margin and as width:50%; display:inline-block;. The outer <div> also has no padding, etc. Firebug shows the outer <div> to be of 1240px width, and each inner one to be 620px. So why do they appear one below the other and not side-by-side? If i lower their width to 618px, it works. Huh?
display:inline-block is inconvenient in the way that it takes in consideration mark-up whitespace when drawing the elements, AFAIK. Try setting font-size:0 to the parent element if it doesn't have any other text, and set the desired font-size for the child elements.
P.S., first try eliminating white-space in the mark-up between the elements, to see if that corrects the issue.
It sounds like a fairly simple solution, if you have two blocks, A and B and they are the exact same size and you are looking at them straight on and they are lined up perfectly you will only see one block.
You're trying to make something display that doesn't fit inside of the container. You've already solved your problem size the container up or the contents down mildly to fit them together.
Has anyone else ever ran across this? This is the second time it's come up in as many years and I am not sure the "correct" way to solve it.
I can achieve the same results with padding in the child, but it just makes no sense.
Testing in Safari/FF.
I usually solve this problem by setting display: inline-block on outer div. It'll make outer div to occupy exactly the space necessary to display its content.
An example, showing the difference.
It is called margin-collapse. When a top and bottom margin are directly touching (not separated by anything, like a border or line break) the margins collapse into a single margin. This is not a bug. Read more about it here at SitePoint.
Sounds like margin collapsing which is natural behaviour. This is a good read:
http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2003/11/no_margin_for_error/
There are number of ways to get round margin collapsing issues. One way is to add a border
or 1px of padding around the elements so that the borders are no longer touching and so no
longer collapse.
Another way to stop margins collapsing is to change the position property of the
element.The CSS2 Specs explain that margins of absolutely and relatively positioned boxes
don't collapse. Also if you float a box it's margins no longer collapse. It's not always
appropriate to change the position properties of an element but in some situations if
you're having problems with unwanted margin collapsing, this may be an option.
I've got 4 divs inside a parent div. To get them to appear side by side, I've given all 4 divs a style with float:left. The divs do appear side by side, but the parent div's height does not grow to encompass the height of the child divs. What am I missing?
This is a quirk cause by the implementation of floating elements, and occurs when you have a parent element that contains nothing but floating child elements. There are two methods to solve it. One is to set the parent element's overflow property to hidden, sometimes known as the overflow method. The other is known as the clearfix method, and involves the use of the :after pseudo-class.
The clearfix method has the advantage of allowing for specifically positioned elements to "hang" outside of the parent container if you ever need them to, at the expense of a bit of extra CSS and markup. This is the method I prefer, as I utilize hanging elements frequently.
Set overflow: hidden; on the parent div.
Explanation: floating elements removes them from the regular document flow. So, if a given element contains only floated elements, it will not have any height (or, by extension, width -- unless it has an implicit width that is default on block elements).
Setting the overflow property to hidden tells the parent element to respect the width of it's children, but hide everything that falls outside it's width and height.
Of course, the other option is to add an element after the floated divs, inside the parent, with clear: both; This makes the last element be positioned after all the floats, within the regular document flow. Since it's inside the parent, the parent's height is whatever the heights of the floated items are, plus regular padding and the height of the cleared item.
After the 4 divs, you need to "cancel" the float style.
This is done through the creation of a p for example, like: <p style="clear: both"></p>
Your parent div will automatically get the right size.
millinet's answer will work, or you could float the parent div which will also allow it to expand to contain its content
I think you should give the parent div a height of 100% not fixed so that it encompasses the height of child divs if they grow.
I recommend the clearfix method as well. This problem occurs because floating an element removes any height that it would normally contain.
PositionIsEverything posts a complete explanation as well as corresponding solutions for IE6, since the :after pseudoselector is not supported by older browsers.
If you want the divs to be side-by-side, you could try using inline-block:
<style>
.alldivs {
display: inline-block;
}
</style>
<div id="wrapper">
<div id="div1" class="alldivs"></div>
<div id="div2" class="alldivs"></div>
<div id="div3" class="alldivs"></div>
<div id="div4" class="alldivs"></div>
</div>