How to align checkboxes and their labels consistently cross-browsers

Question

This is one of the minor CSS problems that plagues me constantly. How do folks around Stack Overflow vertically align checkboxes and

Answer 1

Sometimes vertical-align needs two inline (span, label, input, etc...) elements next to each other to work properly. The following checkboxes are properly vertically centered in IE, Safari, FF, and Chrome, even if the text size is very small or large.

They all float next to each other on the same line, but the nowrap means that the whole label text always stays next to the checkbox.

The downside is the extra meaningless SPAN tags.

.checkboxes label {
  display: inline-block;
  padding-right: 10px;
  white-space: nowrap;
}
.checkboxes input {
  vertical-align: middle;
}
.checkboxes label span {
  vertical-align: middle;
}

  

     Label text x
     Label text y
     Label text z
  

Now, if you had a very long label text that needed to wrap without wrapping under the checkbox, you'd use padding and negative text indent on the label elements:

.checkboxes label {
  display: block;
  padding-right: 10px;
  padding-left: 22px;
  text-indent: -22px;
}
.checkboxes input {
  vertical-align: middle;
}
.checkboxes label span {
  vertical-align: middle;
}

  

     Label text x so long that it will probably wrap so let's see how it goes with the proposed CSS (expected: two lines are aligned nicely)
     Label text y
     Label text z