Space Between Nowrap Inline Blocks

Space between nowrap inline blocks

That's because of a space character between inline(-block) elements (a line break and a few tabs counts as a space), This could be fixed by commenting that space out this way:

<div style="background: red;"></div><!-- 
 --><div style="background: yellow;"></div><!-- 
 --><div style="background: green;"></div><!-- 
 --><div style="background: blue;"></div>

Online Demo.

Actually, it's not a bug, it's the normal behavior of the inline elements; Just like when you place an image next to a line of text, or put a button next to an input element.

There are couple of ways to remove the space between inline(-block) elements:

• Minimized the HTML
• Negative margins
• Comment the white space out
• Break the closing tag
• Set the font size of the parent to zero then reset that for children
• Float the inline items instead
• Use flexbox

Check the Chris Coyier's Article, or these similar topics on SO:

• Why is there a gap between image and navigation bar
• How to remove the space between inline-block elements?
• A Space between Inline-Block List Items
• How to remove "Invisible space" from HTML

How to remove the space between inline/inline-block elements?

Alternatively, you should now use flexbox to achieve many of the layouts that you may previously have used inline-block for: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/

Since this answer has become rather popular, I'm rewriting it significantly.

Let's not forget the actual question that was asked:

How to remove the space between inline-block elements? I was hoping
for a CSS solution that doesn't require the HTML source code to be
tampered with. Can this issue be solved with CSS alone?

It is possible to solve this problem with CSS alone, but there are no completely robust CSS fixes.

The solution I had in my initial answer was to add font-size: 0 to the parent element, and then declare a sensible font-size on the children.

http://jsfiddle.net/thirtydot/dGHFV/1361/

This works in recent versions of all modern browsers. It works in IE8. It does not work in Safari 5, but it does work in Safari 6. Safari 5 is nearly a dead browser (0.33%, August 2015).

Most of the possible issues with relative font sizes are not complicated to fix.

However, while this is a reasonable solution if you specifically need a CSS only fix, it's not what I recommend if you're free to change your HTML (as most of us are).

This is what I, as a reasonably experienced web developer, actually do to solve this problem:

<p>
    <span>Foo</span><span>Bar</span>
</p>

Yes, that's right. I remove the whitespace in the HTML between the inline-block elements.

It's easy. It's simple. It works everywhere. It's the pragmatic solution.

You do sometimes have to carefully consider where whitespace will come from. Will appending another element with JavaScript add whitespace? No, not if you do it properly.

Let's go on a magical journey of different ways to remove the whitespace, with some new HTML:

<ul>
    <li>Item 1</li>
    <li>Item 2</li>
    <li>Item 3</li>
</ul>

• You can do this, as I usually do:

   <ul>
       <li>Item 1</li><li>Item 2</li><li>Item 3</li>
   </ul>
  

http://jsfiddle.net/thirtydot/dGHFV/1362/

• Or, this:

   <ul>
       <li>Item 1</li
       ><li>Item 2</li
       ><li>Item 3</li>
   </ul>
  

• Or, use comments:

   <ul>
       <li>Item 1</li><!--
       --><li>Item 2</li><!--
       --><li>Item 3</li>
   </ul>
  

• Or, if you are using using PHP or similar:

   <ul>
       <li>Item 1</li><?
       ?><li>Item 2</li><?
       ?><li>Item 3</li>
   </ul>
  

• Or, you can even skip certain closing tags entirely (all browsers are fine with this):

   <ul>
       <li>Item 1
       <li>Item 2
       <li>Item 3
   </ul>
  

Now that I've gone and bored you to death with "one thousand different ways to remove whitespace, by thirtydot", hopefully you've forgotten all about font-size: 0.

Space between inline-block and inline element

When an inline element's boundary lies between two spaces the space that follows the boundary (outside the inline element) is removed, leaving the space within the inline element. In your case, the space that is trimmed off is the newline that separates your span elements. From the spec:

For each inline element (including anonymous inline elements), the following steps are performed, treating bidi formatting characters as if they were not there:

4. If 'white-space' is set to 'normal', 'nowrap', or 'pre-line',
   
   
   
   
   2. any space (U+0020) following another space (U+0020) — even a space before the inline, if that space also has 'white-space' set to 'normal', 'nowrap' or 'pre-line' — is removed.

Note that this is only the case with inline boxes, i.e. display: inline elements — not inline-blocks. Appending a space to the content of your inline-block element will not cause the space after it to be collapsed away.

The height difference mainly has to do with how the height of inline elements vs inline-blocks is calculated, which is an entire topic in itself. See sections 10.6.6 and 10.8.1 of the spec.

Why do inline-block elements in a nowrap div overflow?

As the name suggests, inline-blocks participate in inline layout, which means they act just like inline elements, and text. white-space: nowrap causes text to overflow in an element by preventing it from wrapping; the same thing happens with inline-blocks. It's that simple.

The fact that #headline has white-space: normal has no impact on its own layout. An element's white-space property affects the layout of its contents, not itself, even if the element's own box is inline-level.

Why is there an unexplainable gap between these inline-block div elements?

In this instance, your div elements have been changed from block level elements to inline elements. A typical characteristic of inline elements is that they respect the whitespace in the markup. This explains why a gap of space is generated between the elements. (example)

There are a few solutions that can be used to solve this.

Method 1 - Remove the whitespace from the markup

Example 1 - Comment the whitespace out: (example)

<div>text</div><!--
--><div>text</div><!--
--><div>text</div><!--
--><div>text</div><!--
--><div>text</div>

Example 2 - Remove the line breaks: (example)

<div>text</div><div>text</div><div>text</div><div>text</div><div>text</div>

Example 3 - Close part of the tag on the next line (example)

<div>text</div
><div>text</div
><div>text</div
><div>text</div
><div>text</div>

Example 4 - Close the entire tag on the next line: (example)

<div>text
</div><div>text
</div><div>text
</div><div>text
</div><div>text
</div>

Method 2 - Reset the font-size

Since the whitespace between the inline elements is determined by the font-size, you could simply reset the font-size to 0, and thus remove the space between the elements.

Just set font-size: 0 on the parent elements, and then declare a new font-size for the children elements. This works, as demonstrated here (example)

#parent {
    font-size: 0;
}

#child {
    font-size: 16px;
}

This method works pretty well, as it doesn't require a change in the markup; however, it doesn't work if the child element's font-size is declared using em units. I would therefore recommend removing the whitespace from the markup, or alternatively floating the elements and thus avoiding the space generated by inline elements.

Method 3 - Set the parent element to display: flex

In some cases, you can also set the display of the parent element to flex. (example)

This effectively removes the spaces between the elements in supported browsers. Don't forget to add appropriate vendor prefixes for additional support.

.parent {
    display: flex;
}
.parent > div {
    display: inline-block;
    padding: 1em;
    border: 2px solid #f00;
}

.parent {    display: flex;}.parent > div {    display: inline-block;    padding: 1em;    border: 2px solid #f00;}

<div class="parent">    <div>text</div>    <div>text</div>    <div>text</div>    <div>text</div>    <div>text</div></div>

<div class="tr" style="width: 150px;">
    <div class="td" style="width: 50px; background-color: #CCC;"></div><!--
    --><div class="td" style="width: 50px; background-color: #AAA;"></div><!--
    --><div class="td" style="width: 50px; background-color: #666;"></div>
</div>

.tr {
  font-size: 0;
}
.td {
  font-size: 15px;
}