How do you keep parents of floated elements from collapsing? [duplicate]

Answer 1

One of the most well known solutions is a variation of your solution number 3 that uses a pseudo element instead of a non-semantic html element.

It goes something like this...

.cf:after {
    content: " ";
    display: block;
    visibility: hidden;
    height: 0;
    clear: both;
}

You place that in your stylesheet, and all you need is to add the class 'cf' to the element containing the floats.

What I use is another variation which comes from Nicolas Gallagher.

It does the same thing, but it's shorter, looks neater, and maybe used to accomplish another thing that's pretty useful - preventing the child elements' margins from collapsing with it's parents' (but for that you do need something else - read more about it here http://nicolasgallagher.com/micro-clearfix-hack/ ).

.cf:after {
    content: " ";
    display: table;
    clear: float;
}

Answer 2

add this in the parent div at the bottom

 <div style="clear:both"></div>

Answer 3

I believe that best way is to set clear:both to the upcoming element.

Here's why:

1) :after selector is not supported in IE6/7 and buggy in FF3, however,
     if you care only about IE8+ and FF3.5+ clearing with :after is probably best for you...

2) overflow is supposed to do something else so this hack isn't reliable enough.

Note to author: there is nothing hacky on clearing... Clearing means to skip the floating fields. CLEAR is with us since HTML3 (who knows, maybe even longer) http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/deflists.html , maybe they should chose a bit different name like page: new, but thats just a detail...

Answer 4

Solution 1:

The most reliable and unobtrusive method appears to be this:

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/SO_AMK/wXaEH/

HTML:

<div class="clearfix">
    <div style="float: left;">Div 1</div>
    <div style="float: left;">Div 2</div>
</div>​

CSS:

.clearfix::after { 
   content: " ";
   display: block; 
   height: 0; 
   clear: both;
}

​With a little CSS targeting, you don't even need to add a class to the parent DIV.

This solution is backward compatible with IE8 so you don't need to worry about older browsers failing.

Solution 2:

An adaptation of solution 1 has been suggested and is as follows:

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/wXaEH/162/

HTML:

<div class="clearfix">
    <div style="float: left;">Div 1</div>
    <div style="float: left;">Div 2</div>
</div>​

CSS:

.clearfix::after { 
   content: " ";
   display: block; 
   height: 0; 
   clear: both;
   *zoom: expression( this.runtimeStyle['zoom'] = '1', this.innerHTML += '<div class="ie7-clear"></div>' );
}

.ie7-clear {
    display: block;
    clear: both;
}

This solution appears to be backward compatible to IE5.5 but is untested.

Solution 3:

It's also possible to set display: inline-block; and width: 100%; to emulate a normal block element while not collapsing.

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/SO_AMK/ae5ey/

CSS:

.clearfix {
    display: inline-block;
    width: 100%;
}

This solution should be backward compatible with IE5.5 but has only been tested in IE6.

Answer 5

Another possible solution which I think is more semantically correct is to change the floated inner elements to be 'display: inline'. This example and what I was working on when I came across this page both use floated divs in much exactly the same way that a span would be used. Instead of using divs, switch to span, or if you are using another element which is by default 'display: block' instead of 'display: inline' then change it to be 'display: inline'. I believe this is the 100% semantically correct solution.

Solution 1, floating the parent, is essentially to change the entire document to be floated.

Solution 2, setting an explicit height, is like drawing a box and saying I want to put a picture here, i.e. use this if you are doing an img tag.

Solution 3, adding a spacer to clear float, is like adding an extra line below your content and will mess with surrounding elements too. If you use this approach you probably want to set the div to be height: 0px.

Solution 4, overflow: auto, is acknowledging that you don't know how to lay out the document and you are admitting that you don't know what to do.

Answer 6

Although the code isn't perfectly semantic, I think it's more straightforward to have what I call a "clearing div" at the bottom of every container with floats in it. In fact, I've included the following style rule in my reset block for every project:

.clear 
{
   clear: both;
}

If you're styling for IE6 (god help you), you might want to give this rule a 0px line-height and height as well.