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How can I eliminate spacing between inline elements in CSS?

Asked 2011-06-02T10:31:56.800
32

I have a div with a bunch of image tags inside, here is an example:

<div style="margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0;">
    <a href="/view/foo1"><img src="foo1.jpg" alt="Foo1" /></a>
    <a href="/view/foo2"><img src="foo2.jpg" alt="Foo2" /></a>
    <a href="/view/foo3"><img src="foo3.jpg" alt="Foo3" /></a>
</div>

Because there is whitespace between the tags, browsers will display some whitespace between the images (Chrome decides on 4px). How can I tell the browser to show NO whitespace whatsoever between the images, without placing the > and < directly next to each other? I know letter-spacing applies in addition to what the browser decides to use, so that's useless even with a negative value. Basically I'm going for something like Twitter has at the bottom of their home page. I looked at their code and they're using an unordered list. I could just do that but I'd like the technical explanation for why there appears to be no way to eliminate the white space from between these images.

html css whitespace removing-whitespace
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1 Answer

27

If you for some reason want to do it:

  • without using floats, and;
  • without collapsing the whitespace in your HTML (which is the easiest solution, and for what it's worth, what Twitter is doing)

You can use the solution from here:

How to remove the space between inline-block elements?

I've refined it slightly since then.

See: http://jsfiddle.net/JVd7G/

letter-spacing: -1px is to fix Safari.

div {
    font-size: 0;
    letter-spacing: -1px
}

<div style="margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0;">
    <a href="/view/foo1"><img src="http://dummyimage.com/64x64/444/fff" alt="Foo1" /></a>
    <a href="/view/foo2"><img src="http://dummyimage.com/64x68/888/fff" alt="Foo2" /></a>
    <a href="/view/foo3"><img src="http://dummyimage.com/64x72/bbb/fff" alt="Foo3" /></a>
</div>
answered 2011-06-02T11:14:37.513

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