Advantages of using display:inline-block vs float:left in CSS

Question

In 3 words: inline-block is better.

Inline Block

The only drawback to the display: inline-block approach is that in IE7 and below an element can only be displayed inline-block if it was already inline by default. What this means is that instead of using a <div> element you have to use a <span> element. It's not really a huge drawback at all because semantically a <div> is for dividing the page while a <span> is just for covering a span of a page, so there's not a huge semantic difference. A huge benefit of display:inline-block is that when other developers are maintaining your code at a later point, it is much more obvious what display:inline-block and text-align:right is trying to accomplish than a float:left or float:right statement. My favorite benefit of the inline-block approach is that it's easy to use vertical-align: middle, line-height and text-align: center to perfectly center the elements, in a way that is intuitive. I found a great blog post on how to implement cross-browser inline-block, on the Mozilla blog. Here is the browser compatibility.

Float

The reason that using the float method is not suited for layout of your page is because the float CSS property was originally intended only to have text wrap around an image (magazine style) and is, by design, not best suited for general page layout purposes. When changing floated elements later, sometimes you will have positioning issues because they are not in the page flow. Another disadvantage is that it generally requires a clearfix otherwise it may break aspects of the page. The clearfix requires adding an element after the floated elements to stop their parent from collapsing around them which crosses the semantic line between separating style from content and is thus an anti-pattern in web development.

Any white space problems mentioned in the link above could easily be fixed with the white-space CSS property.

Edit:

SitePoint is a very credible source for web design advice and they seem to have the same opinion that I do:

If you’re new to CSS layouts, you’d be forgiven for thinking that using CSS floats in imaginative ways is the height of skill. If you have consumed as many CSS layout tutorials as you can find, you might suppose that mastering floats is a rite of passage. You’ll be dazzled by the ingenuity, astounded by the complexity, and you’ll gain a sense of achievement when you finally understand how floats work.

Don’t be fooled. You’re being brainwashed.

http://www.sitepoint.com/give-floats-the-flick-in-css-layouts/

2015 Update - Flexbox is a good alternative for modern browsers:

.container {
  display: flex; /* or inline-flex */
}

.item {
  flex: none | [ <'flex-grow'> <'flex-shrink'>? || <'flex-basis'> ]
}

More info

Dec 21, 2016 Update

Bootstrap 4 is removing support for IE9, and thus is getting rid of floats from rows and going full Flexbox.

Pull request #21389

While I agree that in general inline-block is better, there's one extra thing to take into account if you're using percentage widths to create a responsive grid (or if you want pixel-perfect widths):

If you're using inline-block for grids that total 100% or near to 100% width, you need to make sure your HTML markup contains no white space between columns.

With floats, this is not something you need to worry about - the columns float over any whitespace or other content between columns. This question's answers have some good tips on ways to remove HTML whitespace without making your code ugly.

If for any reason you can't control the HTML markup (e.g. a restrictive CMS), you can try the tricks described here, or you might need to compromise and use floats instead of inline-block. There are also ugly CSS tricks that should only be used in extreme circumstances, like font-size:0; on the column container then reapply font size within each column.

For example:

• Here's a 3-column grid of 33.3% width with float: left. It "just works" (but for the wrapper needing to be cleared).
• Here's the exact same grid, with inline-block. The whitespace between blocks creates a fixed-width space which pushes the total width beyond 100%, breaking the layout and causing the last column to drop down a line.
• Here' s the same grid, with inline-block and no whitespace between columns in the HTML. It "just works" again - but the HTML is uglier and your CMS might force some kind of prettification or indenting to its HTML output making this difficult to achieve in reality.

If you want to align the div with pixel accurate, then use float. inline-block seems to always requires you to chop off a few pixels (at least in IE)

You can find answer in depth here.

But in general with float you need to be aware and take care of the surrounding elements and inline-block simple way to line elements.

Thanks

There is one characteristic about inline-block which may not be straight-forward though. That is that the default value for vertical-align in CSS is baseline. This may cause some unexpected alignment behavior. Look at this article.

http://www.brunildo.org/test/inline-block.html

Instead, when you do a float:left, the divs are independent of each other and you can align them using margin easily.