Reply To: Inline Behavior of an Element

[Paulie_D]

Because padding on inline elements is kind quirky…adding increased the visual size but does nothing to affect the block context of the span…as such it doesn’t move. It’s in the CSS2 spec.

You can find a whole article on it at http://maxdesign.com.au/news/inline/..but the important parts are:

The W3C’s CSS2 spec states that for Inline, non-replaced elements, the ‘height’ property doesn’t apply, but the height of the box is given by the ‘line-height’ property.

While padding can be applied to all sides of an inline element, only left and right padding will have an effect on surrounding content.

What’s wrong with inline-block…it seems to be exactly what you are looking for?