Hello,

I have built a lot of layouts using floats. The purpose is to be able to get elements next to each other horizontally. This is very useful but yesterday I had strange thoughts about turning <div> elements into inline elements. Given a fixed width outer wrapper, shouldn’t inline elements behave exactly like floats? If so, why isn’t anyone using inline elements rather than floated elements?

A floated element can still be a block element, meaning you can still specify its width and height and apply vertical margin/padding. Once you turn an element inline, you can’t.

So as long as you don’t need to be specific with dimensions or margin/padding, you can go inline if it works for you.

Hi Andy!

Thanks for that info. I since researched the inline model some more and ended up with this article.