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It is used to push the element vertically past the float. Computing the clearance of an element on which 'clear' is set is done by first determining the hypothetical position of the element's top border edge.
This position is where the actual top border edge would have been if the element's 'clear' property had been 'none'. If this hypothetical position of the element's top border edge is not past the relevant floats, then clearance is introduced, and margins collapse according to the rules in 8. Then the amount of clearance is set to the greater of: The amount necessary to place the border edge of the block even with the bottom outer edge of the lowest float that is to be cleared. The amount necessary to place the top border edge of the block at its hypothetical position.
Alternatively, clearance is set exactly to the amount necessary to place the border edge of the block even with the bottom outer edge of the lowest float that is to be cleared. Both behaviors are allowed pending evaluation of their compatibility with existing Web content. A future CSS specification will require either one or the other. The clearance can be negative or zero. Assume for the sake of simplicity , that we have just three boxes, in this order: B2 has 'clear' set to 'both'. We also assume B2 is not empty. Without considering the 'clear' property on B2, we have the situation in the diagram below.
The margins of B1 and B2 collapse. We also assume that B2 is not below F, i. The first way is to put the top of B2 flush with the bottom of F, i. That means, because the margins no longer collapse with a clearance between them: An example of negative clearance is this situation, in which the clearance is -1em. Assume none of the elements have borders or padding: Without the 'clear', the first and last paragraphs' margins would collapse and the last paragraph's top border edge would be flush with the top of the floating paragraph.
But the 'clear' requires the top border edge to be below the float, i. This means that clearance must be introduced. When the property is set on floating elements, it results in a modification of the rules for positioning the float. An extra constraint 10 is added:. This property applied to all elements in CSS1. Implementations may therefore have supported this property on all elements. Therefore authors should only use this property on block-level elements.
If an implementation does support clear on inline elements, rather than setting a clearance as explained above, the implementation should force a break and effectively insert one or more empty line boxes or shifting the new line box downward as described in section 9. In the absolute positioning model, a box is explicitly offset with respect to its containing block. It is removed from the normal flow entirely it has no impact on later siblings. An absolutely positioned box establishes a new containing block for normal flow children and absolutely but not fixed positioned descendants.
However, the contents of an absolutely positioned element do not flow around any other boxes. They may obscure the contents of another box or be obscured themselves , depending on the stack levels of the overlapping boxes. References in this specification to an absolutely positioned element or its box imply that the element's 'position' property has the value 'absolute' or 'fixed'. Fixed positioning is a subcategory of absolute positioning. The only difference is that for a fixed positioned box, the containing block is established by the viewport.
For continuous media , fixed boxes do not move when the document is scrolled.
In this respect, they are similar to fixed background images. For paged media , boxes with fixed positions are repeated on every page. This is useful for placing, for instance, a signature at the bottom of each page. Boxes with fixed position that are larger than the page area are clipped. Parts of the fixed position box that are not visible in the initial containing block will not print. Authors may use fixed positioning to create frame-like presentations.
Consider the following frame layout:. The three properties that affect box generation and layout — 'display' , 'position' , and 'float' — interact as follows:. To illustrate the differences between normal flow, relative positioning, floats, and absolute positioning, we provide a series of examples based on the following HTML:. The final positions of boxes generated by the outer and inner elements vary in each example. In each illustration, the numbers to the left of the illustration indicate the normal flow position of the double-spaced for clarity lines. The diagrams in this section are illustrative and not to scale.
They are meant to highlight the differences between the various positioning schemes in CSS 2. Consider the following CSS declarations for outer and inner that do not alter the normal flow of boxes:. The P element contains all inline content: Therefore, all of the content will be laid out in an inline formatting context, within a containing block established by the P element, producing something like:.
Text flows normally up to the outer element. The outer text is then flowed into its normal flow position and dimensions at the end of line 1. Then, the inline boxes containing the text distributed over three lines are shifted as a unit by 'px' upwards. The contents of inner , as a child of outer , would normally flow immediately after the words "of outer contents" on line 1. However, the inner contents are themselves offset relative to the outer contents by '12px' downwards , back to their original position on line 2.
Boxes with fixed position that are larger than the page area are clipped. If not, the inline boxes will be split up and distributed across several line boxes. Relative parent Absolute child. Anyway, did you try the absolute solution? The padding is inserted before, above, and below "emphasized" and after, above, and below "words". When the element moves, no other element on the layout will be affected. When a box B is relatively positioned, the position of the following box is calculated as though B were not offset.
Note that the content following outer is not affected by the relative positioning of outer. Note also that had the offset of outer been 'px', the text of outer and the body text would have overlapped. Now consider the effect of floating the inner element's text to the right by means of the following rules:.
Text flows normally up to the inner box, which is pulled out of the flow and floated to the right margin its 'width' has been assigned explicitly. Line boxes to the left of the float are shortened, and the document's remaining text flows into them. To show the effect of the 'clear' property, we add a sibling element to the example:. However, if the 'clear' property on the sibling element is set to 'right' i.
Finally, we consider the effect of absolute positioning. Consider the following CSS declarations for outer and inner:. The containing block for a positioned box is established by the nearest positioned ancestor or, if none exists, the initial containing block , as in our example.
The top side of the outer box is 'px' below the top of the containing block and the left side is 'px' from the left side. The child box of outer is flowed normally with respect to its parent. The following example shows an absolutely positioned box that is a child of a relatively positioned box. Although the parent outer box is not actually offset, setting its 'position' property to 'relative' means that its box may serve as the containing block for positioned descendants.
Since the outer box is an inline box that is split across several lines, the first inline box's top and left edges depicted by thick dashed lines in the illustration below serve as references for 'top' and 'left' offsets. The following illustration shows where the inner box would end up in this case.
Relative and absolute positioning may be used to implement change bars, as shown in the following example. First, the paragraph whose containing block sides are shown in the illustration is flowed normally. Then it is offset '10px' from the left edge of the containing block thus, a right margin of '10px' has been reserved in anticipation of the offset. The two hyphens acting as change bars are taken out of the flow and positioned at the current line due to 'top: The result is that the change bars seem to "float" to the left of the current line.
For a positioned box, the 'z-index' property specifies: The stack level of the box in the current stacking context. Whether the box establishes a stacking context. Values have the following meanings: The box also establishes a new stacking context. The box does not establish a new stacking context unless it is the root element.
In this section, the expression "in front of" means closer to the user as the user faces the screen. In addition to their horizontal and vertical positions, boxes lie along a "z-axis" and are formatted one on top of the other. Z-axis positions are particularly relevant when boxes overlap visually. This section discusses how boxes may be positioned along the z-axis.
The order in which the rendering tree is painted onto the canvas is described in terms of stacking contexts. Stacking contexts can contain further stacking contexts. A stacking context is atomic from the point of view of its parent stacking context; boxes in other stacking contexts may not come between any of its boxes. Each box belongs to one stacking context. Each positioned box in a given stacking context has an integer stack level , which is its position on the z-axis relative other stack levels within the same stacking context.
Boxes with greater stack levels are always formatted in front of boxes with lower stack levels. Boxes may have negative stack levels. Boxes with the same stack level in a stacking context are stacked back-to-front according to document tree order. The root element forms the root stacking context. Other stacking contexts are generated by any positioned element including relatively positioned elements having a computed value of 'z-index' other than 'auto'.
Stacking contexts are not necessarily related to containing blocks. Within each stacking context, the following layers are painted in back-to-front order: This painting order is applied recursively to each stacking context. In the following example, the stack levels of the boxes named with their "id" attributes are: The "text2" stack level is inherited from the root box. The others are specified with the 'z-index' property.
This example demonstrates the notion of transparency. The default behavior of the background is to allow boxes behind it to be visible. In the example, each box transparently overlays the boxes below it. This behavior can be overridden by using one of the existing background properties. Conforming user agents that do not support bidirectional text may ignore the 'direction' and 'unicode-bidi' properties described in this section.
This exception includes UAs that render right-to-left characters simply because a font on the system contains them but do not support the concept of right-to-left text direction. The characters in certain scripts are written from right to left. In some documents, in particular those written with the Arabic or Hebrew script, and in some mixed-language contexts, text in a single visually displayed block may appear with mixed directionality.
This phenomenon is called bidirectionality , or "bidi" for short. The algorithm consists of an implicit part based on character properties, as well as explicit controls for embeddings and overrides. The 'direction' and 'unicode-bidi' properties allow authors to specify how the elements and attributes of a document language map to this algorithm.
This sequence forms the "paragraph" unit in the bidirectional algorithm. The paragraph embedding level is set according to the value of the 'direction' property of the containing block rather than by the heuristic given in steps P2 and P3 of the Unicode algorithm. Because the directionality of a text depends on the structure and semantics of the document language, these properties should in most cases be used only by designers of document type descriptions DTDs , or authors of special documents.
If a default style sheet specifies these properties, authors and users should not specify rules to override them. The style sheet rules that would achieve the bidi behavior specified in [HTML4] are given in the sample style sheet. The HTML 4 specification also contains more information on bidirectionality issues. This property specifies the base writing direction of blocks and the direction of embeddings and overrides see 'unicode-bidi' for the Unicode bidirectional algorithm.
In addition, it specifies such things as the direction of table column layout, the direction of horizontal overflow , the position of an incomplete last line in a block in case of 'text-align: For the 'direction' property to affect reordering in inline elements, the 'unicode-bidi' property's value must be 'embed' or 'override'.
The 'direction' property, when specified for table column elements, is not inherited by cells in the column since columns are not the ancestors of the cells in the document tree. The final order of characters in each block container is the same as if the bidi control codes had been added as described above, markup had been stripped, and the resulting character sequence had been passed to an implementation of the Unicode bidirectional algorithm for plain text that produced the same line-breaks as the styled text.
In this process, replaced elements with 'display: All other atomic inline-level boxes are treated as neutral characters always. Please note that in order to be able to flow inline boxes in a uniform direction either entirely left-to-right or entirely right-to-left , more inline boxes including anonymous inline boxes may have to be created, and some inline boxes may have to be split up and reordered before flowing. Because the Unicode algorithm has a limit of 61 levels of embedding, care should be taken not to use 'unicode-bidi' with a value other than 'normal' unless appropriate.
In particular, a value of 'inherit' should be used with extreme caution. However, for elements that are, in general, intended to be displayed as blocks, a setting of 'unicode-bidi: The following example shows an XML document with bidirectional text. It illustrates an important design principle: DTD designers should take bidi into account both in the language proper elements and attributes and in any accompanying style sheets.
The style sheets should be designed so that bidi rules are separate from other style rules. The bidi rules should not be overridden by other style sheets so that the document language's or DTD's bidi behavior is preserved. In this example, lowercase letters stand for inherently left-to-right characters and uppercase letters represent inherently right-to-left characters:.
Since this is XML, the style sheet is responsible for setting the writing direction. This is the style sheet:. The PARs are blocks that inherit the base direction from their parents. Thus, the first two PARs are read starting at the top right, the final three are read starting at the top left. The EMPH element is inline-level, and since its value for 'unicode-bidi' is 'normal' the initial value , it has no effect on the ordering of the text. Just breaking the long line from the earlier formatting would not have worked.
Note also that the first syllable from english19 might have fit on the previous line, but hyphenation of left-to-right words in a right-to-left context, and vice versa, is usually suppressed to avoid having to display a hyphen in the middle of a line. This model would apply in the following example if the following rules: Here are some examples of the 'display' property: If the containing block is sufficiently wide, all the inline boxes will fit into a single line box: Several emphasized words appear in this sentence, dear. The previous paragraph might be split as follows: Consider the following example: The following three rules are equivalent: Consider the following HTML source and style sheet: This document might be formatted as: Assuming a rule such as this: Consider the following frame layout: In this example, lowercase letters stand for inherently left-to-right characters and uppercase letters represent inherently right-to-left characters: This is the style sheet: The formatting of this text might look like this if the line length is long: If lines have to be broken, it might be more like this: The inside of an inline-block is formatted as a block box, and the element itself is formatted as an atomic inline-level box.
For information about lists and examples of list formatting, please consult the section on lists. Descendant elements do not generate any boxes either; the element and its content are removed from the formatting structure entirely. This behavior cannot be overridden by setting the 'display' property on the descendants. In the float model, a box is first laid out according to the normal flow, then taken out of the flow and shifted to the left or right as far as possible.
Content may flow along the side of a float. In the absolute positioning model, a box is removed from the normal flow entirely it has no impact on later siblings and assigned a position with respect to a containing block. The 'top' , 'right' , 'bottom' , and 'left' properties do not apply. Then the box is offset relative to its normal position. When a box B is relatively positioned, the position of the following box is calculated as though B were not offset. The effect of 'position: These properties specify offsets with respect to the box's containing block.
Absolutely positioned boxes are taken out of the normal flow. This means they have no impact on the layout of later siblings. Also, though absolutely positioned boxes have margins, they do not collapse with any other margins. As with the 'absolute' model, the box's margins do not collapse with any other margins. In the case of handheld, projection, screen, tty, and tv media types, the box is fixed with respect to the viewport and does not move when scrolled.
In the case of the print media type, the box is rendered on every page, and is fixed with respect to the page box, even if the page is seen through a viewport in the case of a print-preview, for example. For other media types, the presentation is undefined. Authors may wish to specify 'fixed' in a media-dependent way. For instance, an author may want a box to remain at the top of the viewport on the screen, but not at the top of each printed page. The two specifications may be separated by using an media rule , as in: Positioned elements generate positioned boxes, laid out according to four properties: The values for the four properties have the following meanings: Negative values are allowed.
See the sections on the width and height of absolutely positioned , non-replaced elements for details. For replaced elements, the effect of this value depends only on the intrinsic dimensions of the replaced content. See the sections on the width and height of absolutely positioned, replaced elements for details. The padding is inserted before, above, and below "emphasized" and after, above, and below "words". A dashed border is rendered on three sides in each case.
If 'right' is specified as 'auto', its used value is minus the value of 'left'. Several floats may be adjacent, and this model also applies to adjacent floats in the same line.
The values of this property have the following meanings: Content flows on the right side of the box, starting at the top subject to the 'clear' property. User agents may treat float as 'none' on the root element. Here are the precise rules that govern the behavior of floats: The left outer edge of a left-floating box may not be to the left of the left edge of its containing block. An analogous rule holds for right-floating elements.
If the current box is left-floating, and there are any left-floating boxes generated by elements earlier in the source document, then for each such earlier box, either the left outer edge of the current box must be to the right of the right outer edge of the earlier box, or its top must be lower than the bottom of the earlier box. Analogous rules hold for right-floating boxes. Check my other article about the Display property here.
There are 5 main values of CSS Positions: We have height and width x, y as 2 dimensions. Z is the 3rd dimension. An element comes in front of other elements as its z-index value increases. Whether we declare it or not, elements are positioned in normal order on the webpage. Then, we create 2 boxes and define their positions:.
I will explain this in another article. But only defining position: However, an absolute positioned element is relative to its parent. An element with position: It is positioned automatically to the starting point top-left corner of its parent element. Change its position value to absolute:. The coordinates of an absolute positioned element are relative to its parent if the parent also has a non-static position. It is not relative to its parent container anymore.