CSS white-space nowrap not working

Question

I have a div with several child divs which are floating left. I don't want them to break, so I set them to display:inline-block and white-space:nowrap. Unfortunately nothing happens at all. They just keep breaking.

At the end I want to scroll in x-direction, but when I add overflow-x:scroll; overflow-y:visible it scrolls in y-direction.

.a {
    width: 400px;
    height: 300px;
    white-space: nowrap;
    display: inline-block;
}
.b {
    float: left;
    width: 50px;
    height: 200px;
    display: inline-block;
}

<div class="a">
    <div class="b"></div>
    <div class="b"></div>
    <div class="b"></div>
    <div class="clearfix"></div>
</div>

You can see my complete implementation on JSFiddle

Answer 1

I may not fully understand your question but it seems like the divs/scroll behave if you remove: float: left; from .b and add: overflow:auto; to .a