How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup
Clearing Floats The Old Fashioned Way
When a float is contained within a container box that has a visible border or background, that float does not automatically force the container's bottom edge down as the float is made taller. Instead the float is ignored by the container and will hang down out of the container bottom like a flag. Those familiar only with Explorer for Windows may scratch their heads and say "That's not right!" True, IE/Win does enclose a float within a container 'automatically', but only if the container element happens to possess the MS-only quality called hasLayout.
This float-enclosing behavior in IE can also be 'toggled' off again just by hovering of links within the container, if that hovering alters either the link background or one of several other CSS properties. Quite a mess, and we'll cover it farther along in the article, in the "Toggle Trouble" section.
The W3C suggests placing a "cleared" element last in the container box, which is then recognized by the container height, forcing the container to enclose the float above that cleared element too. It's described more fully our article Float: The Theory:
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When a float is contained within a container box that has a visible border or background, that float does not automatically force the container's bottom edge down as the float is made taller. Instead the float is ignored by the container and will hang down out of the container bottom like a flag. Those familiar only with Explorer for Windows may scratch their heads and say "That's not right!" True, IE/Win does enclose a float within a container 'automatically', but only if the container element happens to possess the MS-only quality called hasLayout.This float-enclosing behavior in IE can also be 'toggled' off again just by hovering of links within the container, if that hovering alters either the link background or one of several other CSS properties. Quite a mess, and we'll cover it farther along in the article, in the "Toggle Trouble" section.
The W3C suggests placing a "cleared" element last in the container box, which is then recognized by the container height, forcing the container to enclose the float above that cleared element too. It's described more fully our article Float: The Theory:
“..let's say you give that following box the clear property, {clear: both;} . What this does is extend the margin on the top of the cleared box, pushing it down until it "clears" the bottom of the float. In other words, the top margin on the cleared box (no matter what it may have been set to), is increased by the browser, to whatever length is necessary to keep the cleared box below the float.”So in effect, such a cleared box cannot be at the same horizontal level as a preceding float. It must appear just below that level. The image shows how this might look, with a red border representing the container element:
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