Html – CSS vertical alignment text inside li

csshtmlvertical-alignment

I am displaying number of boxes in a row with fix height and width, generated from <li> tags.
now I need to align the text in the vertical center.
The CSS vertical-align has no impact, maybe I am missing something???

I am not looking for tricks using (margin, padding, line-height), these will not work because some text are long and will break into two lines.

Please find the actual code:

CSS code

ul.catBlock{
  width:960px; 
  height: 270px; 
  border:1px solid #ccc; 
}

ul.catBlock li{
  list-style: none; 
  float:left; 
  display:block; 
  text-align: center; 
  width:160px; 
  height: 100px;
}

ul.catBlock li a{ 
  display: block;  
  padding: 30px 10px 5px 10px; 
  height:60px;
}

HTML code

<ul class="catBlock">
 <li><a href="#">IP Phone</a></li>
 <li><a href="#">Dual SIM Switch Server</a></li>
 <li><a href="#">IP PBX</a></li>
</ul>

Best Answer

Define the parent with display: table and the element itself with vertical-align: middle and display: table-cell.

Related Solutions

Html – Set cellpadding and cellspacing in CSS

Basics

For controlling "cellpadding" in CSS, you can simply use padding on table cells. E.g. for 10px of "cellpadding":

td { 
    padding: 10px;
}

For "cellspacing", you can apply the border-spacing CSS property to your table. E.g. for 10px of "cellspacing":

table { 
    border-spacing: 10px;
    border-collapse: separate;
}

This property will even allow separate horizontal and vertical spacing, something you couldn't do with old-school "cellspacing".

Issues in IE ≤ 7

This will work in almost all popular browsers except for Internet Explorer up through Internet Explorer 7, where you're almost out of luck. I say "almost" because these browsers still support the border-collapse property, which merges the borders of adjoining table cells. If you're trying to eliminate cellspacing (that is, cellspacing="0") then border-collapse:collapse should have the same effect: no space between table cells. This support is buggy, though, as it does not override an existing cellspacing HTML attribute on the table element.

In short: for non-Internet Explorer 5-7 browsers, border-spacing handles you. For Internet Explorer, if your situation is just right (you want 0 cellspacing and your table doesn't have it defined already), you can use border-collapse:collapse.

table { 
    border-spacing: 0;
    border-collapse: collapse;
}

Note: For a great overview of CSS properties that one can apply to tables and for which browsers, see this fantastic Quirksmode page.

Html – Vertically align text next to an image

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>