What is the difference between inline-block and inline-table?

Question

As far as I can tell, these display selectors seem to be identical.

From the Mozilla CSS documentation:

inline-table: The inline-table value does not have a direct mapping in HTML. It behaves like a <table> HTML element, but as an inline box, rather than a block-level box. Inside the table box is a block-level context.

inline-block: The element generates a block element box that will be flowed with surrounding content as if it were a single inline box (behaving much like a replaced element would).

It seems that whatever could be done with inline-table can be done with inline-block.

Answer 1

Both inline-block and inline-table have an inline outer display role. That means

The element generates an inline-level box.

The difference is that

• inline-block has a flow-root inner display model, that is

  The element generates a block container box, and lays out its contents using flow layout. It always establishes a new block formatting context for its contents.

• inline-table has a table inner display model, that is

  The element generates a principal table wrapper box containing an additionally-generated table box, and establishes a table formatting context.

However, in most cases, inline-table will behave like inline-block because of anonymous table objects:

Generate missing child wrappers:

• If a child C of a 'table' or 'inline-table' box is not a proper table child, then generate an anonymous 'table-row' box around C and all consecutive siblings of C that are not proper table children.
• If a child C of a 'table-row' box is not a 'table-cell', then generate an anonymous 'table-cell' box around C and all consecutive siblings of C that are not 'table-cell' boxes.

Therefore, if your inline-table element has non-tabular content, that content will be wrapped in an anonymous table-cell.

And table-cell has a flow-root inner display model, just like inline-block.

But if the inline-table has tabular content, it will behave differently than inline-block.

Some examples:

• Inside an inline-block, cells with non-tabular separator will generate different table anonymous parents, so they will appear at different lines. Inside an inline-table, it will be the separator who will generate a table-cell parent, so they all will appear at the same row.

  .itable {    display: inline-table;  }  .iblock {    display: inline-block;  }  .cell {    display: table-cell;  }  .wrapper > span {    border: 1px solid #000;    padding: 5px;  }

  <fieldset>    <legend>inline-table</legend>    <div class="itable wrapper">      <span class="cell">table-cell</span>      <span class="iblock">inline-block</span>      <span class="cell">table-cell</span>    </div>  </fieldset>  <fieldset>    <legend>inline-block</legend>    <div class="iblock wrapper">      <span class="cell">table-cell</span>      <span class="iblock">inline-block</span>      <span class="cell">table-cell</span>    </div>  </fieldset>

• Inner cells won't grow to fill a wide inline-block:

  .itable {    display: inline-table;  }  .iblock {    display: inline-block;  }  .wrapper {    width: 100%;  }  .cell {    display: table-cell;    border: 1px solid #000;  }

  <fieldset>    <legend>inline-table</legend>    <div class="itable wrapper">      <span class="cell">table-cell</span>    </div>  </fieldset>  <fieldset>    <legend>inline-block</legend>    <div class="iblock wrapper">      <span class="cell">table-cell</span>    </div>  </fieldset>

• The border of the inline-block won't collapse with the border of the inner cells:

  .wrapper, .cell {    border-collapse: collapse;    border: 5px solid #000;  }  .itable {    display: inline-table;  }  .iblock {    display: inline-block;  }  .cell {    display: table-cell;  }

  <fieldset>    <legend>inline-table</legend>    <div class="itable wrapper">      <span class="cell">table-cell</span>      <span class="cell">table-cell</span>    </div>  </fieldset>  <fieldset>    <legend>inline-block</legend>    <div class="iblock wrapper">      <span class="cell">table-cell</span>      <span class="cell">table-cell</span>    </div>  </fieldset>

Answer 2

display:table will make your tag behave like a table. inline-table just means that the element is displayed as an inline-level table. You can then do table-cell to let your element behave like a <td> element.

display:inline - displays your element as an inline element (like <span>), and inline-block will just group them together in a block container.

As the other answer suggested you can replace between the two as long as you follow the display convention in the rest of your code. (i.e. use table-cell with inline-table and not with inline-block).
Check this link for more info on display.