Best way to manage whitespace between inline list items
Several options here, first I'll give you my normal practice when creating inline lists:
<ul id="navigation">
<li><a href="#" title="">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="#" title="">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="#" title="">Home</a></li>
</ul>
Then the CSS to make it function as you intend:
#navigation li
{
display: inline;
list-style: none;
}
#navigation li a, #navigation li a:link, #navigation li a:visited
{
display: block;
padding: 2px 5px 2px 5px;
float: left;
margin: 0 5px 0 0;
}
Obviously I left out the hover and active sets, but this creates a nice block level navigation, and is a very common method for doing this while still keeping with standards. /* remember to tweak to your liking, add color to the background, et cetera */
If you would like to keep it just with text and just inline, no block elements I believe you'd want to add:
margin: 0 5px 0 0; /* that's, top 0, right 5px, bottom 0, left 0 */
Realizing you would like to REMOVE the whitespace, just adjust the margins/padding accordingly.
Another useful way to eliminate the whitespace is to set the list's font-size
property to 0
and the list elements' one back to the required size.
What you really want is the CSS3 white-space-collapse: discard. But I'm not sure if any browsers actually support that property.
A couple alternative solutions is to let the tailing end of a tag consume the whitespace. For example:
<ul id="nav"
><li><a href="./">Home</a></li
><li><a href="/About">About</a></li
><li><a href="/Contact">Contact</a></li
></ul>
Another thing I've seen done is to use HTML comments to consume whitespace
<ul id="nav"><!--
--><li><a href="./">Home</a></li><!--
--><li><a href="/About">About</a></li><!--
--><li><a href="/Contact">Contact</a></li><!--
--></ul>
See thismat's solution if you are okay using floats, and depending on the requirements you might need to add a trailing <li>
that is set to clear: both;
.
But the CSS3 property is probably the best theoretical way.