Question

I have the following HTML:

    <ul>
        <li>
        <div>first</div>
        </li>
        <li>
        <div>first</div>
        </li>
        <li>
        <div>first</div>
        </li>
        <li>
        <div>first</div>
        </li>
    </ul>

and the following css rules:

        ul {
            padding: 0;
            border: solid 1px #000;
        }
        li {
            display:inline-block;
            padding: 10px;
            width: 114px;
            border: solid 1px #f00;
            margin: 0;
        }

        li div {
            background-color: #000;
            width: 114px;
            height: 114px;
            color: #fff;
            font-size: 18px;
        }

For some strange reason, the list items appear with a margin around them in both Firefox and Chrome. Looking at firebug, the list items do not have any margin at all, but there seems to be a void space between them.

If I later on add more list items via javascript using

$('<li><div>added via js</div></li>').appendTo($('ul'));

the “margin” doesn’t appear around the new elements:

Any idea of what the hell’s happening here?

Answer 1

This is caused by the display: inline-block;

li {
    display: inline-block;
    padding: 10px;
    width: 114px;
    border: solid 1px #f00;
    margin: 0;
}

Change it to float: left;.

I thought it was the padding but took a closer look and turns out it was the display 🙂

Example here.

---

After further research I have discovered that inline-block is a whitespace dependent method and renders a 4px margin to the right of each element.

To avoid this you could run all your lis together in one line, or block the end tags and begin tags together like this:

<ul>
        <li>
            <div>first</div>
        </li><li>
            <div>first</div>
        </li><li>
            <div>first</div>
        </li><li>
            <div>first</div>
        </li>
</ul>

Example here.