Floats, Margins and IE

 

Internet Explorer's problems rendering floats have been thoroughly analyzed, thanks in large part to Big John's efforts characterizing and publicizing them. We do still stumble onto undocumented oddities, though, and this demo presents one that hasn't been isolated yet—or we haven't heard about it if it has—and as a delightful by-product, suggests a simpler work-around (or maybe a hack) than we have been using for a bothersome rendering issue that's been around a while.

The bug demonstrated here causes in-line elements (images, text) adjacent to a floated div to appear to be indented from their expected location. The indentation is caused by IE6's weird handling of margins on floated elements. The happy by-product is a cleaner way to defeat the doubled-margin bug.

(Note: If you're looking at this in some browser other than Internet Explorer 6 on Windows, you're likely to wonder what the heck I'm talking about. All other browsers I have tested render the examples below properly and ignore the work-arounds—you have to use IE6 to really see what's going on, but I've included screenshots in case you just can't bring yourself to open IE)

Most of the CSS sits in a style block in the header of this page, but where I alter the styles to demonstrate the bug I've put the changes in-line so they'll be easy to find, and there are obvious comments in the source at the beginning of each example to make it even easier.

The relevant style declarations in the header are:

body{
   font-size: 100%;
   background-color: #ccddcc;
   color: #000;
   font-family: arial, helvetica, geneva, sans-serif;
   margin: 0 15%;
}

.box{
   clear: both;
   width: 80%;
   background: #fff url(images/75pxWide.png) no-repeat;
   color: #000;
   padding: 1em;
   border: 2px solid #EFCE8C;
}

.sidebar{
   float: right;
   width: 15em;
   font-size: 80%;
   border: 2px dotted #000;
   padding: 1em;
   margin-left: 75px;
   background-color: #f8eece;
   color: #000;
}

The in-line styles used in each demo are documented below those demos.

Each example uses the same basic mark-up:

<div class="box">
   <div class="sidebar"> a floated box with some content
   </div>
   some content
</div>

Changes in mark-up will also be documented when they're used.

What's With The Blue Thing?

Not all of us can visualize a 75 pixel width, or know when we're looking at one, so to help out I've included a blue, 75-pixel-wide image in all of the examples. It's easy to spot because it's blue and says "This is 75 px wide." In all cases this image is applied as a background to the div holding the example and so takes up no space. It's there just to make it easier to see when a false margin is being applied.

Let's Start With Something We Know

First a review—the infamous IE6 margin-doubling bug could be one of the most pervasive problems ever to come out of the IE browser. When an element with a left-margin is floated left, IE6 will double the left margin of the floated element. (See a full treatment of the double-margin bug.) Here's a simple example:

This div is floated left with a left margin of 75px. It should almost butt up against the 75 pixel wide background image (1em of padding will separate them), but as you can see, the actual margin rendered is twice what is set in the CSS.

Floating a box so that a section of text will wrap around it is a fairly common technique in Web design. We use it to place images on a page as well as to create sidebars, like this one, which work well for testimonials and similar pieces of information. Example 1

Mark-up looks like this—

<div class="box">
   <div class="sidebar" style="float: left">content
   </div>
   content
</div>

...and here's a screen shot (IE6/WinXP):

The standard work around for the bug is to wrap an additional div around the floated div, apply the float to the wrapper and remove the float on the interior div, like so—

<div class="box">
   <div style="float: left>
      <div class="sidebar" style="float: none">content
      </div>
   </div>
   content
</div>

Now the floated element has no margin, and the element with the margin isn't floated, with this result—

Nesting another div inside the floated div and applying the margin (and whatever other styles are required) to the nested div lets us work around the margin-doubling bug.

Floating a box so that a section of text will wrap around it is a fairly common technique in web design. We use it to place images on a page as well as to create sidebars, like this one, which work well for testimonials and similar pieces of information. Example 2

Screen Shot:

Which is what we would see without the wrapper div except for the bug, and what we do see in other browsers.

The Fake Indent

That double-margin effect is plenty peculiar itself, but under some other conditions IE6 gets even weirder, applying the margin of a floated element, in full, at two different places on the page. Look at the following example:

This box is floated right and has a margin-left of 75px. Not only does that margin create white space to the left of this box, but it also creates white space to the left of where the div occurs in the document mark-up.

The box to the right appears in the document mark-up just before the first word of this section of text. The 75 pixel margin for the floated box is rendered to the left of the box, but is also responsible for the first line of this text appearing to be indented 75px. This bug only occurs when the floated box is adjacent to an in-line element. This section of text is unstyled in order to show the bug—if it were enclosed in <p> tags the bug would not appear. Example 3

Screen shot:

You can see that he first line of the text is indented 75 pixels right. That 75 pixels comes from the 75 pixel left-margin of the sidebar div. I'll prove it to you.

If I change the mark-up to this—

<div class="box">
   <div class="sidebar" style="margin-left: 0">content
   </div>
   content
</div>

—removing the offending 75 pixel margin, IE delivers this:

This box is floated right and has had the margin-left removed. Notice how the apparent indent of the text in the larger box disappears.

The box to the right appears in the document mark-up just before the first word of this section of text. Removing the margin-left of the floated div from the above example also removes the apparent indentation of this text. Example 4

Screen shot:

Miraculous! No indent. And just to see if the bug is symmetrical, we can swap the direction of the floats:

<div class="box" style="background-position: top right">
   <div class="sidebar" style="float: left; margin-right: 75px;
      margin-left: 0;">content
   </div>
   content
</div>

This time the box is floated left and has a margin-right of 75px. The white space to the right of this box is what we expect, but the white space to the right of the end of the first line of text is a result of the bug.

X X X X X X X X X X The bug causes a "reverse indent", or a 75 pixel margin to the right of the first line of text—notice none of the Xs above overlaps the 75 pixel wide background image. Instead, that first line wraps 75 pixels before we should expect it to. Example 5

Screen shot:

And one more time, with a different kind of in-line element getting the fake indent, in this case a string of images:

Since images are in-line elements just like bare text, the string of images to the left display the same bug, with the first line appearing to have a 75 pixel indent.

Example 6

Screen shot:

So what gives?

Well, there's nothing scientific going on here—this is a simple case of an IE6 rendering error. If you look at this page in a standards-compliant browser (yes, I know they're recommendations, not standards) none of the margins are borked—not on the examples where IE6 messes them up, and not on the examples where work-arounds are applied.

It's important to notice that IE6 applies this "indentation" only to in-line elements. If the text in the examples were surrounded by <p> tags, or <div> tags, which is much more common than having bare text, the IE bug would not show up.

How Do You Fix It?

The work around for this bug is preposterously simple, counter-intuitive and utterly in violation of the W3C recommendations—simply change the style of the floated element to "display: inline" and the problem disappears.

So do this—

<div class="box">
   <div class="sidebar" style="display: inline">content
   </div>
   content
</div>

and get this—

This box is floated right and has a margin-left of 75px. With this div styled display:inline, the margin is applied only to the left of the element, even in IE6.

Notice that every line of this text lines up on the left, and overwrites the background-image, demonstrating that the browser is no longer applying the floated element's margin to the first line of the text. Example 7

Screen shot:

and this—

This time the box is floated left and has a margin-right of 75px. And now the first line of text contains Xs that happily over-write the background image.

X X X X X X X X X X Now the text is happy to overwrite the background-image because by changing the floated element to "display: inline" we have essentially erased the bug, while altering a style that all other browsers, rightly, simply ignore for floated elements. Example 8

Screen shot:

and this—

The images are happy too, now ignoring this box's 75 pixel left margin and obscuring the background image.

Example 9

Screen shot:

The Spec

The W3C specifications are very clear on the subject of the display function relative to floats:

9.5.1 Positioning the float: the 'float' property

"This property specifies whether a box should float to the left, right, or not at all. It may be set for elements that generate boxes that are not absolutely positioned. The values of this property have the following meanings:

left

The element generates a block box that is floated to the left. Content flows on the right side of the box, starting at the top (subject to the 'clear' property). The 'display' is ignored, unless it has the value 'none'.

right

Same as 'left', but content flows on the left side of the box, starting at the top.

none

The box is not floated. "

According to the highlighted section of the spec, changing the display type, unless you change it to "none", should have no effect. Lucky for us IE ignored this part of the spec, allowing a simple, relatively harmless fix for their rendering bug.

As An Extra Bonus...

Changing the display property of the floated element to display: inline is a clean, simple way to fix fake indentation, but as an added treat, the same fix works for the double margin bug.

Here's a copy of Example 1 above demonstrating the double-margin bug.

This div is floated left with a left margin of 75px. It should butt up against the 75 pixel wide background image, but as you can see (if you're looking in IE6), the actual margin rendered is twice what is set in the CSS.

Floating a box so that a section of text will wrap around it is a fairly common technique in web design. We use it to place images on a page as well as to create sidebars, like this one, which work well for testimonials and similar pieces of information. Example 1

Screen shot:

And now the same example, except with the float styled "display: inline".

This div is floated left with a left margin of 75px. It should butt up against the 75 pixel wide background image, but as you can see (if you're looking in IE6), the actual margin rendered is twice what is set in the CSS.

Floating a box so that a section of text will wrap around it is a fairly common technique in Web design. We use it to place images on a page as well as to create sidebars, like this one, which work well for testimonials and similar pieces of information. Example 11

Screen shot:

<div class="box">
   <div class="sidebar" style="float: left; display: inline">content
   </div>
   content
</div>

And there you have it! With a little CSS declaration and without changing the mark-up at all, we can now fix on of the most common IE6 rendering bug around.

I'd like to thank Big John for generously sharing his expertise while I constructed this demo and for his encouragement to see it through.
Steve Clason
www.topdogstrategy.com
Last updated July 7th, 2008