IE double margin float bug

I'm sure most people have come across this bug once or twice (or a hundred times). You have a div with a set width and it's floated left or right. You also give it a margin on the same side that it's floated to push it away from the edge of the containing area. Works great everywhere . . . EXCEPT IE! Of course. Your CSS might look something like this:

#box {
  width: 200px;
  float: left;
  margin-left: 20px;
}

The problem with IE/Win is that it doubles the margin that's on the same side as the float. Why does it do this, you ask? Because it's IE. If it behaved the way it was supposed to, it would be Firefox.

There's actually a really simply fix for this. All you have to do is add the magical display:inline to your div, so your final code would be:

#box {
  width: 200px;
  float: left;
  margin-left: 20px;
  display: inline;
}

You can find this hack and many more at this great CSS resource Web site.

Tagged: ie sucks, xhtml, css

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