Question

I have a bunch of inline-block elements over several lines which I’d like to center horizontally. The inline-block elements all have the same fixed size, but I’d like the centering to be able to handle page resizing and adding or removing elements.

I’ve stripped down the html/css and removed the attempt at centering for clarity. It’s at http://jsfiddle.net/fe25H/1/

If you resize the results window so that the third inline-block element drops down, the container fills the width and we get this:

-----------------BODY------------------
|                                     |
||-------------CONTAINER-------------||
||-INLINEBLOCK---INLINEBLOCK--       ||
|||____________||____________|       ||
||-INLINEBLOCK--                     ||
|||____________|                     ||
||___________________________________||
|_____________________________________|

rather than this:

-----------------BODY------------------
|                                     |
|   |----------CONTAINER---------|    |
|   |-INLINEBLOCK---INLINEBLOCK--|    |
|   ||____________||____________||    |
|   |-INLINEBLOCK--              |    |
|   ||____________|              |    |
|   |____________________________|    |
|_____________________________________|

edit based on ptriek’s answer regarding a JavaScript solution:

Ptriek’s code was a useful starting point; it works for the specific case, but not the general one. I’ve mostly rewritten it to be more flexible (see http://jsfiddle.net/fe25H/5/).

Answer 1

After thinking a bit about it, I agree with Wex’ comment above.

So I fiddled a JavaScript solution (jQuery) – I’m not an expert on this, so the code might be improved – but I guess it does exactly what you need:

var resizeContainer = function () {
    var w_window = $(window).width();
    var w_block = $('.inlineblock').width();
    if (w_window < w_block * 3 && w_window >= w_block * 2) {
        $('.container').width(w_block * 2);
    } else if (w_window < w_block * 2) {
        $('.container').width(w_block);
    }  else {
        $('.container').width(w_block * 3);
    } 
};


$(document).ready(resizeContainer);
$(window).resize(resizeContainer);

body {
    text-align:center;
}
.container {
    display: inline-block;
    background-color: #aaa;
    text-align:left;
}
.inlineblock {
    display: inline-block;
    width: 200px;
    height: 200px;
    background-color: #eee;
}

<div class='container'>
    <div class='inlineblock'></div>
    <div class='inlineblock'></div>
    <div class='inlineblock'></div>
</div>

http://jsfiddle.net/ptriek/fe25H/4/