More IE/CSS/div fun

Alex — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:29:52 +0000

Not being a designer spending all my time getting to know the ins and outs of how floating divs work, it tends to take me a little while to get my head around how to lay out pages using pure CSS. I thought I’d pretty much got how to do 2 and 3 column layouts with CSS and divs, but today I found a new problem which really had me stumped for a while.

Essentially I wanted an ordered list, then within each

element a couple of

s which I could float to layout how I wanted. Everything was working fine in Firefox, but not in IE(6), the images below show the output given in Firefox and IE:

IE (6):

Firefox:

HTML code which generated the above images.

The items numbered 1-3 show how I want the output to appear, but my first stab at the code resulted in items numbered 4-6. As you can see, in Firefox it appears fine, but in IE the ‘float:left’ is being ignored, making the div containing the text appear below the checkbox. [Aside: you might ask why I'm using divs and floats for something as simple as just some text next to a checkbox, well, this is just my starting point, my final page will be more complicated than this example!]

The only difference between the working and non-working examples is that the div containing text has width property defined (set to 100%) in the working version. I’m not sure why this should be necessary – my example shows that it’s not needed if the wrapper div isn’t part of an ordered list.

My only explanation is that this is another (frustrating) little IE CSS bug – unless anyone can give me another explanation? Alternatively if there are better ways to do what I’m trying to achieve?

Alex Little » div

More IE/CSS/div fun