Question

I have a fluid width container DIV.

Within this I have 4 DIVs all 300px x 250px…

<div id="container">
   <div class="box1"> </div>
   <div class="box2"> </div>
   <div class="box3"> </div>
   <div class="box4"> </div>
</div>

What I want to happen is box 1 to be floated left, box 4 to be floated right and box 2 and 3 to be spaced evenly between them. I want the spacing to be fluid as well so as the browser is made smaller the space becomes smaller also.

Answer 1

See: http://jsfiddle.net/thirtydot/EDp8R/

• This works in IE6+ and all modern browsers!
• I’ve halved your requested dimensions just to make it easier to work with.
• text-align: justify combined with .stretch is what’s handling the positioning.
• display:inline-block; *display:inline; zoom:1 fixes inline-block for IE6/7, see here.
• font-size: 0; line-height: 0 fixes a minor issue in IE6.

#container {
  border: 2px dashed #444;
  height: 125px;
  text-align: justify;
  -ms-text-justify: distribute-all-lines;
  text-justify: distribute-all-lines;
  /* just for demo */
  min-width: 612px;
}

.box1,
.box2,
.box3,
.box4 {
  width: 150px;
  height: 125px;
  vertical-align: top;
  display: inline-block;
  *display: inline;
  zoom: 1
}

.stretch {
  width: 100%;
  display: inline-block;
  font-size: 0;
  line-height: 0
}

.box1,
.box3 {
  background: #ccc
}

.box2,
.box4 {
  background: #0ff
}

<div id="container">
  <div class="box1"></div>
  <div class="box2"></div>
  <div class="box3"></div>
  <div class="box4"></div>
  <span class="stretch"></span>
</div>

The extra span (.stretch) can be replaced with :after.

This still works in all the same browsers as the above solution. :after doesn’t work in IE6/7, but they’re using distribute-all-lines anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

See: http://jsfiddle.net/thirtydot/EDp8R/3/

There’s a minor downside to :after: to make the last row work perfectly in Safari, you have to be careful with the whitespace in the HTML.

Specifically, this doesn’t work:

<div id="container">
    ..
    <div class="box3"></div>
    <div class="box4"></div>
</div>

And this does:

<div id="container">
    ..
    <div class="box3"></div>
    <div class="box4"></div></div>

---

You can use this for any arbitrary number of child divs without adding a boxN class to each one by changing

.box1, .box2, .box3, .box4 { ...

to

#container > div { ...

This selects any div that is the first child of the #container div, and no others below it. To generalize the background colors, you can use the CSS3 nth-order selector, although it’s only supported in IE9+ and other modern browsers:

.box1, .box3 { ...

becomes:

#container > div:nth-child(odd) { ...

See here for a jsfiddle example.