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CSS: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition
book

CSS: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition

by Eric Meyer, Estelle Weyl
May 2023
Intermediate to advanced
1126 pages
30h 2m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from CSS: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition

Chapter 10. Floating and Positioning

For a very long time, floated elements were the basis of all our web layout schemes. (This is largely because of the property clear, which we’ll get to in a bit.) But floats were never meant for layout; their use as a layout tool was a hack nearly as egregious as the use of tables for layout. They were just what we had. Floats are quite interesting and useful in their own right, however. This is especially true given the recent addition of float shaping, which allows the creation of nonrectangular shapes that content can flow past.

Floating

Ever since the early 1990s, it has been possible to float images by declaring, for instance, <img src="b5.gif" alt="B4" align="right">. This causes an image to float to the right and allows other content (such as text) to “flow around” the image. The name floating, in fact, came from the Netscape DevEdge page “Extensions to HTML 2.0,” which explained the then-new align attribute. Unlike HTML, CSS lets you float any element, from images to paragraphs to lists. This is accomplished using the property float.

For example, to float an image to the left, you could use this markup:

<img src="b4.gif" style="float: left;" alt="b4">

As Figure 10-1 illustrates, the image “floats” to the left side of the browser window, and the text flows around ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781098117603Errata Page