What is the reason behind a span's impact on the vertical alignment of another sibling span?

Upon examining the HTML structure below, I noticed that there are inconsistencies in the vertical alignment of text within two spans (span1 and span2) enclosed within a div. Additionally, the second span contains another sub-span called span2a, which also contains text. This variation in alignment seems perplexing to me.

Further complicating matters are the presence of style attributes on both span2 and span2a, which are dynamically injected at runtime by the jQuery cycle plugin, leaving them beyond my control.


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <title>Test</title> 
    <style type="text/css">
        body {margin: 0; padding: 0; font-family: arial; color: black;}
        .container { height: 30px; text-align: left; padding: 8px 15px 0 15px; background-color: #fee; border: 1px solid red;}
        .ticker { font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 4px; float: left;}
        .ticker > span:first-child { background-color: #bfb; }
        .tickerscroll { display: inline-block; background-color: #bbf; }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
    <div class="container">
        <div class="ticker">
            <span class="span1">LABEL: </span>
            <span class="span2 tickerscroll" style="position: relative; width: 480px; height: 15px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; ">
                <span class="span2a" style="position: absolute; top: 0px; opacity: 1; z-index: 3; left: 0px;">The value (in a sub-span; note that Label is lower then this text)</span>
            </span>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="container">
        <div class="ticker">
            <span class="span1">LABEL: </span>
            <span class="span2 tickerscroll" style="position: relative; width: 480px; height: 15px;">
                 <span class="span2a" style="position: absolute; top: 0px; left: 0px;">The value (this time, I've added a &nbsp; outside this inner span)</span>
            </span>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="container">
        <div class="ticker">
            <span class="span1">LABEL: </span>
            <span class="span2 tickerscroll" style="position: relative; width: 480px; height: 15px;">
                The value (this time, the inner span span2a is not present at all)
            </span>
        </div>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Upon evaluation, I have discovered two workarounds that seem to resolve the alignment issue:

  1. Insert text (such as a non-breaking space) within span2 but outside span2a.
  2. Eliminate the sub-span entirely and place the text directly inside the second top-level span. However, this is not feasible due to the necessity of span2a for proper functionality with jQuery cycling.

Is there a way to attain consistent alignment between the two text elements without resorting to inserting a   inside span2 artificially? Keep in mind that any solution should refrain from altering existing style attributes of the span elements while accommodating the addition of CSS classes if needed.

Answer №1

The reason for the vertical alignment difference is due to the default inline nature of span tags. However, in the case of your span2 class, you have overridden this behavior by turning it into a block-level element using the overflow:hidden property. To correct this issue, you can make your span1 class a block-level element as well by adding display:inline-block and aligning it to the top with vertical-align:top, or by simply floating it to the left:

.span1 {
    display: inline-block;
    *display:inline; /* IE 7 fix */
    vertical-align: top;
}

Alternatively,

.span1 {
    float: left;
}

Answer №2

    .ticker span {vertical-align:top}

In response to your inquiry: Span 2 remains empty, resulting in no alignment with span 1. Span 2 serves as the container for absolutely positioned span 2a, which begins at the top:0; left:0 position within span 2, leading to the misalignment observed.

In the alternate scenario where span 2 is not empty, it will align with the baseline of span 1, allowing a.p. span 2a to align correctly.

The third scenario mirrors the second case described above.

Answer №3

In order to achieve consistency, consider implementing the following:

Ensure that all 3 spans share identical line-height and vertical alignment properties.

For instance:

.span1, .span2, .span2a
{
    line-height: 20px;
    vertical-align: middle;
}

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