Warning! This answer is too old and doesn't work on modern browsers.
I'm not the poster of this answer, but at the time of writing this, this is the most voted answer by far in both positive and negative votes (+1035 -17), and it's still marked as accepted answer (probably because the original poster of the question is the one who wrote this answer).
As already noted many times in the comments, this answer does not work on most browsers anymore (and seems to be failing to do that since 2013).
After over an hour of tweaking, testing, and trying different styles of markup, I think I may have a decent solution. The requirements for this particular project were:
- Inputs must be on their own line.
- Checkbox inputs need to align vertically with the label text similarly (if not identically) across all browsers.
- If the label text wraps, it needs to be indented (so no wrapping down underneath the checkbox).
Before I get into any explanation, I'll just give you the code:
label {
display: block;
padding-left: 15px;
text-indent: -15px;
}
input {
width: 13px;
height: 13px;
padding: 0;
margin:0;
vertical-align: bottom;
position: relative;
top: -1px;
*overflow: hidden;
}
<form>
<div>
<label><input type="checkbox" /> Label text</label>
</div>
</form>
Here is the working example in JSFiddle.
This code assumes that you're using a reset like Eric Meyer's that doesn't override form input margins and padding (hence putting margin and padding resets in the input CSS). Obviously in a live environment you'll probably be nesting/overriding stuff to support other input elements, but I wanted to keep things simple.
Things to note:
- The
*overflow
declaration is an inline IE hack (the star-property hack). Both IE 6 and 7 will notice it, but Safari and Firefox will properly ignore it. I think it might be valid CSS, but you're still better off with conditional comments; just used it for simplicity.
- As best I can tell, the only
vertical-align
statement that was consistent across browsers was vertical-align: bottom
. Setting this and then relatively positioning upwards behaved almost identically in Safari, Firefox and IE with only a pixel or two of discrepancy.
- The major problem in working with alignment is that IE sticks a bunch of mysterious space around input elements. It isn't padding or margin, and it's damned persistent. Setting a width and height on the checkbox and then
overflow: hidden
for some reason cuts off the extra space and allows IE's positioning to act very similarly to Safari and Firefox.
- Depending on your text sizing, you'll no doubt need to adjust the relative positioning, width, height, and so forth to get things looking right.
Hope this helps someone else! I haven't tried this specific technique on any projects other than the one I was working on this morning, so definitely pipe up if you find something that works more consistently.
Warning! This answer is too old and doesn't work on modern browsers.
Actually, in this case it's quite simple: apply the vertical align to the image. Since it's all in one line, it's really the image you want aligned, not the text.
<!-- moved "vertical-align:middle" style from span to img -->
<div>
<img style="vertical-align:middle" src="https://via.placeholder.com/60x60">
<span style="">Works.</span>
</div>
Tested in FF3.
Now you can use flexbox for this type of layout.
.box {
display: flex;
align-items:center;
}
<div class="box">
<img src="https://via.placeholder.com/60x60">
<span style="">Works.</span>
</div>
Best Answer
Firstly, this is purely a design-related problem and solution. The design of your grid specifies if justifying text is needed. I think justify align alone has no major effect on usability. Bad typography that makes text illegible is what decreases usability. That said, make sure you have solid contrasts and a good balance of spacing in your type. Font-size matters too.
This site is a successful attempt at justifying text online. Since you can't control the spaces between letters and words nearly as much with CSS as you can with InDesign, it's a lot harder to justify text and not have 'rivers' of whitespace run down your rows, which happens when the spaces between words exceeds the spaces between lines. Things that make justifying text difficult: long words, row widths that don't hold enough words, and too much contrast between the text and the background colors; they make the rivers appear wider and more apparent.
The typographic ideal is to have an even text-block, where if you squint the text block becomes a uniform solid shade. So if you keep text at about 10px and 60% gray on white background, and have rows that fit about 20 words, justify align shouldn't look ugly. But keep in mind this does nothing to improve usability. Small, relatively light text annoys a lot of people, especially the older readers.
I should note that with
­
(soft hyphenation) correctly separating long troublesome words like superÂawesome you can mimic proper typesetting (e.g. InDesign). There's a lot of stuff out there to help you do this. I would recommend the logic for hiding, manipulating, and displaying the text to be done on the client side, perhaps with this.Edit: As others mention below, css hyphens are possible now, except not feasible (not in Chrome). Plus, css4 offers even more control.