How to fix width of DIV that contains floated elements?
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by joe
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Published on 2010-04-09T20:35:53Z
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2010/04/09
23:03 UTC
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I have a DIV container with several inner DIVs layed out by floating them all left. The inner DIVs may change width on certain events, and the containing DIV adjusts accordingly. I use float:left in the container to keep it shrunk to the width of the inner divs. I use float:left in the inner divs so the layout is clean even when their contents change.
The catch is that I want the DIV container width and height to remain constant, UNLESS a particular event causes a change to the inner widths. Conceptually I want to use float on the inners for the layout benefit, but then I want to "fix" them so they don't float around. So if the container is 700px wide, I want it to remain so even if the user narrows the browser window. I'd like the container, and it's internal DIVs to just be clipped by the browser window.
I sense this can all be done nicely in CSS, I just can't quite figure out how. I'm not averse to adding another container if necessary...
Since the only desired layout changes are event-based, I am also willing to use a bit of JS. But is this necessary? (And I'm still not sure I know what to modify: container dimensions? inner floatiness? other?)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
#canvas {
overflow:auto; /* for clearing floats */
}
#container {
float:left; /* so container shrinks around contained divs */
border:thin solid blue;
}
.inner {
float:left; /* so inner elems line up nicely w/o saying fixed coords */
padding-top:8px;
padding-bottom:4px;
padding-left:80px;
padding-right:80px;
}
#inner1 {
background-color:#ffdddd;
}
#inner2 {
background-color:#ddffdd;
}
#inner3 {
background-color:#ddddff;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="canvas">
<div id="container">
<div id="inner1" class="inner">
inner 1
</div>
<div id="inner2" class="inner">
inner 2
</div>
<div id="inner3" class="inner">
inner 3
</div>
</div>
</div>
cleared element
</body>
</html>
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