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Asked: 2026-05-11T06:01:32+00:00

I’m trying to set up a simple horizontal tab structure for a page I’m

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I’m trying to set up a simple horizontal tab structure for a page I’m working on, and I’m running into some trouble with floating div’s combined with z-index.

Viewing the following code in a browser:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd'> <html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'> <head>     <meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=utf-8' />     <title>Untitled Document</title>     <style type='text/css'>         #main { width: 500px; z-index: 1;}          .left { float: left; width: 96px; background-color: red; border: 2px solid orange; z-index: 2; margin-right: -2px }         .right { float: left; width: 396px; background-color: #09c; border: 2px solid green; z-index: 3; }          .clear { clear: both; } </style> </head>  <body>     <div id='main'>         <div class='left'>             LEFT         </div>         <div class='right'>             RIGHT             <br />             RIGHT         </div>         <div class='clear'></div>     </div> </body> </html>

Why doesn’t the left div’s orange border overlap the right div’s green border?

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1 Answer

  1. z-index property will not apply to statically positioned elements. In order to use z-index the CSS must also include any position value other than static (ie relative, absolute, fixed).

    .left { float: left; width: 96px; background-color: red; border: 2px solid orange; z-index: 3; margin-right: -2px; position: relative; } .right { float: left; width: 396px; background-color: #09c; border: 2px solid green; z-index: 2; position: relative; }

    Will give you what you want I think. I added position: relative; and changed the z-index of the .left to 3 (from 2) and changed the z-index of .right to 2 (from 3).

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