Question

I have this fairly simple form:

<form action="...">
    <div>
        <input type="text" class="input-text" value="" name="text" />
        <input type="submit" class="submit" value="Submit" />
    </div>
</form>

The form is sitting inside a fixed-width div (specified in ems).

I want the textfield and button to be a single row, but the textfield width is inconsistent across browsers even when I specify its size attribute. Not wanting to specify exact widths (especially for the button) I was wondering if it was possible to give the textfield a liquid width? I want the textfield to stretch so that both it and the button can fit on a single line.

Answer 1

Yeah length is for character count, not width.

You want the text box to fill all available space short of what the button takes up? This is doable with a table (but I consistently get booed on Stack Overflow for suggesting tables). Let’s say for the sake of argument you use DIVs with display:table, but just for simplicity I’ll illustrate with actual table markup.

<table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 width=100%>
  <tr>
      <td><input type="text" style="width:100%"></td>
      <td style="width:0"><input type="submit"></td>
  </tr>
</table>

The width 0 on the button cell might seem odd, but table cells take their widths only as suggestions. It’ll stretch to fit the content no matter how skinny you make it.