floatleft vs displayinline vs displayinline-block vs displaytable-cell

Positioning elements on a web page is crucial for creating visually appealing and user-friendly layouts. Choosing the right CSS display property can significantly impact how elements interact and flow within their container. This article delves into the nuances of four popular display properties: float: left;, display: inline;, display: inline-block;, and display: table-cell;, exploring their strengths, weaknesses, and ideal use cases. Understanding these differences empowers developers to craft precise and responsive designs.

Float: Left;

The float: left; property shifts an element to the left of its container, allowing subsequent content to wrap around it. This is commonly used for image placement within text or creating multi-column layouts. However, floats can be tricky. A common issue is the “collapsed container” problem, where the parent element doesn’t expand to contain the floated child. This requires clearfix solutions, adding extra markup or CSS.

While float has been a cornerstone of web design, its limitations have led to the adoption of more flexible layout techniques like Flexbox and Grid. However, understanding floats remains valuable, especially when working with older websites or specific layout scenarios.

Display: Inline;

The display: inline; property allows elements to sit within a line of text, much like a word or image within a paragraph. Inline elements only occupy the width and height required by their content and don’t respect vertical margins. This makes them suitable for small elements within a text flow, like hyperlinks or emphasized words. However, they lack the control over dimensions and positioning offered by other display properties.

Think of inline elements as parts of a sentence. They flow naturally with the surrounding text but offer limited layout control.

Display: Inline-Block;

The display: inline-block; property provides a blend of inline and block-level behavior. Elements retain the ability to sit within a line of text but also accept width and height properties, as well as vertical margins. This gives developers greater control over positioning and spacing compared to display: inline;. display: inline-block; is commonly used for navigation menus or creating horizontal lists of items.

This hybrid approach offers a flexible solution for elements that require both inline flow and dimensional control. It’s a valuable tool for creating more complex layouts without resorting to floats.

Display: Table-Cell;

The display: table-cell; property emulates the behavior of table cells, allowing elements to be arranged in rows and columns without using actual table markup. This can be useful for creating grid-like layouts or achieving equal height columns. However, display: table-cell; introduces some complexities related to table layout algorithms, like vertical alignment.

While powerful for specific use cases, display: table-cell; can be more challenging to manage than modern layout techniques. It’s often recommended to explore Flexbox or Grid for complex layouts due to their simpler syntax and greater flexibility.

Choosing the Right Display Property

Selecting the appropriate display property depends on the desired layout behavior and context. For simple text styling, display: inline; suffices. For more control over dimensions and spacing within a line of text, display: inline-block; is preferred. Float is still relevant for specific wrapping scenarios, while display: table-cell; is useful for grid-like layouts when Flexbox or Grid are not feasible.

• Use display: inline; for simple text elements.
• Use display: inline-block; for combining inline flow and dimensional control.

1. Assess your layout needs.
2. Choose the display property that best suits your requirements.
3. Test and refine your layout for responsiveness.

“Understanding the nuances of different CSS display properties is fundamental for creating effective and adaptable web layouts.” - Leading Web Developer (Source: [Insert Authoritative Source Link]).

[Infographic Placeholder: Visual comparison of the four display properties.]

For instance, if you’re creating a horizontal navigation menu, display: inline-block; allows you to style each menu item with specific dimensions and margins while maintaining a horizontal flow. In contrast, using floats for navigation can lead to layout inconsistencies and cross-browser compatibility issues. Similarly, display: table-cell; can help create equal-height columns, a task traditionally difficult to achieve with other display properties.

Learn more about CSS layout techniquesFAQ

Q: What’s the difference between display: inline; and display: inline-block;?

A: display: inline; elements don’t accept width and height properties, while display: inline-block; elements do, offering greater layout control.

By understanding the distinct characteristics of float: left;, display: inline;, display: inline-block;, and display: table-cell;, web developers can create more robust and flexible layouts. As CSS continues to evolve with advancements like Flexbox and Grid, a solid understanding of these fundamental display properties remains invaluable. Explore these properties, experiment with different layout scenarios, and enhance your web development toolkit. To further develop your front-end development skills, consider learning more about related topics such as Flexbox and Grid layout, responsive design, and CSS frameworks like Bootstrap. Dive deeper into these concepts and elevate your web design prowess.

External Link 1 External Link 2 External Link 3Question & Answer :
My Question(s)

1. Are any of these methods preferred by a professional web designer?
2. Are any of these methods prefereed by a web browser when drawing the website?
3. Is this all just personal preference?
4. Are there other techniques I’m missing?

Note: Above questions are in regards to designing a multi-column layout

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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