Best way to manage whitespace between inline list items

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/241512

Question

My HTML is as follows:

<ul id="nav">
    <li><a href="./">Home</a></li>
    <li><a href="/About">About</a></li>
    <li><a href="/Contact">Contact</a></li>
</ul>

And my css:

#nav {
    display: inline;
}

However the whitespace between the li's shows up. I can remove the whitespace by collapsing them like so:

<ul id="nav">
    <li><a href="./">Home</a></li><li><a href="/About">About</a></li><li><a href="/Contact">Contact</a></li>
</ul>

But this is being maintained largely by hand and I was wondering if there was a cleaner way of doing it.

Was it helpful?

Solution

Several options here, first I'll give you my normal practice when creating inline lists:

<ul id="navigation">
  <li><a href="#" title="">Home</a></li>
  <li><a href="#" title="">Home</a></li>
  <li><a href="#" title="">Home</a></li>
</ul>

Then the CSS to make it function as you intend:

#navigation li 
  {
    display: inline;
    list-style: none;
  }
#navigation li a, #navigation li a:link, #navigation li a:visited
  {
    display: block;
    padding: 2px 5px 2px 5px;
    float: left;
    margin: 0 5px 0 0;
  }

Obviously I left out the hover and active sets, but this creates a nice block level navigation, and is a very common method for doing this while still keeping with standards. /* remember to tweak to your liking, add color to the background, et cetera */

If you would like to keep it just with text and just inline, no block elements I believe you'd want to add:

   margin: 0 5px 0 0; /* that's, top 0, right 5px, bottom 0, left 0 */

Realizing you would like to REMOVE the whitespace, just adjust the margins/padding accordingly.

OTHER TIPS

Another useful way to eliminate the whitespace is to set the list's font-size property to 0 and the list elements' one back to the required size.

What you really want is the CSS3 white-space-collapse: discard. But I'm not sure if any browsers actually support that property.

A couple alternative solutions is to let the tailing end of a tag consume the whitespace. For example:

<ul id="nav"
    ><li><a href="./">Home</a></li
    ><li><a href="/About">About</a></li
    ><li><a href="/Contact">Contact</a></li
></ul>

Another thing I've seen done is to use HTML comments to consume whitespace

<ul id="nav"><!--
    --><li><a href="./">Home</a></li><!--
    --><li><a href="/About">About</a></li><!--
    --><li><a href="/Contact">Contact</a></li><!--
--></ul>

See thismat's solution if you are okay using floats, and depending on the requirements you might need to add a trailing <li> that is set to clear: both;.

But the CSS3 property is probably the best theoretical way.

A better solution for list items is to use:

#nav li{float:left; width:auto;}

Has exactly the same visual effect without the headache.

Adopt non-XML-based HTML and omit </li>.

<ul id="nav">
    <li><a href="./">Home</a>
    <li><a href="/About">About</a>
    <li><a href="/Contact">Contact</a>
</ul>

Then set the display property of the items to inline-block instead of inline.

#nav li {
    display: inline-block;
    /display: inline; /* for IE 6 and IE 7 */
    /zoom: 1; /* for IE 6 and IE 7 */
}

The problem is the font size in the UL. Set it to 0 and it will disappear, but you don't want you actual text to be set so small, so then set your LI font size to whatever you want it to be.

<ul style="font-size:0px;">
<li style="font-size:12px;">
</ul>

I had the same Problem and none of the above solutions could fix it. But I found out this works for me:

Instead of this:

<ul id="nav">
   <li><a href="./">Home</a></li>
   <li><a href="/About">About</a></li>
   <li><a href="/Contact">Contact</a></li>
</ul>

build your html code like this (whitespace before and after the link text): 

<ul id="nav">
   <li><a href="./"> Home </a></li>
   <li><a href="/About"> About </a></li>
   <li><a href="/Contact"> Contact </a></li>
</ul>

<html>
<head>
<style>
ul li, ul li:before,ul li:after{display:inline;  content:' '; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<ul><li>one</li><li>two</li><li>three</li></ul>
<ul>
    <li>one</li>
    <li>two</li>
    <li>three</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
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