Drawing empty inline boxes in CSS?

Question

I'm sure this is very simple, but I'm trying to draw a set of small, empty, inline boxes in HTML like the following:

<span style="border:1px solid black;height=10px;width=17px"></span>

Earlier, did simple .gif images earlier but looked fuzzy as the browsers' displays are scaled up or down.

<span> however being an inline element does not honor the height and width properties. And of course using <div style="display:inline;... exhibits the same behavior in that it then won't honor those properties.

Can you please suggest a CSS'y way?

---

Update Assume the following, if I float it it will bond to the right or left of the text and I need it inlined to the text based upon the browser's width, &c

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, <INSERT BOX HERE> consectetur adipisicing 
elit, <INSERT OTHER BOX HERE> sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et 
dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation</p>

Answer 1

height and width can only be applied to elements with hasLayout property. SPAN element by default does not implement this property.

Because inline-block does not work correctly on all major browsers I would recommend using padding-dimension trick:

<span style="font-size:30px; padding-left:30px; background:red;">&nbsp;</span>

You might need to play a little bit with dimensions because global font-size, font-family and line-height can affect the real size of your box.

Edit: Drawing empty boxes is the bit I missed, but I think it is quite obvious from my code anyway. If not, this is another example:

<style type="text/css">
.box1 { font-size:15px; font-family:Tahoma; padding-left:15px; border:1px solid red; overflow:hidden; }
.box2 { font-size:10px; font-family:Tahoma; padding-left:15px; border:1px solid green; overflow:hidden; }
.box3 { font-size:5px; font-family:Tahoma; padding-left:5px; border:1px solid blue; overflow:hidden; }
</style>

This is red box: <span class="box1">&nbsp;</span> and this is green box: <span class="box2">&nbsp;</span>.
And this is another box, this time it is blue: <span class="box3">&nbsp;</span>.

And this code produces this as an output: alt text http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/5865/boxes.png

And because we put   inside every span, this trick will work on all browsers.