CSS fixed width in a span

Within an unordered list:

<li><span></span> The lazy dog.</li>
<li><span>AND</span> The lazy cat.</li>
<li><span>OR</span> The active goldfish.</li>

Adding a class or style attribute is permitted but padding the text and adding or changing tags is not allowed.

The page is rendering with Courier New.

Goal is to have text after span lined up.

    The lazy dog.
AND The lazy cat.
OR  The active goldfish.

Justification of the "OR" is unimportant.

The lazy animal text may be wrapped in an additional element but I'll have to double check.

In an ideal world you'd achieve this simply using the following css

<style type="text/css">

span {
  display: inline-block;
  width: 50px;
}

</style>

This works on all browsers apart from FF2 and below.

Firefox 2 and lower don't support this value. You can use -moz-inline-box, but be aware that it's not the same as inline-block, and it may not work as you expect in some situations.

Quote taken from quirksmode

ul {
  list-style-type: none;
  padding-left: 0px;
}

ul li span {
  float: left;
  width: 40px;
}

<ul>
  <li><span></span> The lazy dog.</li>
  <li><span>AND</span> The lazy cat.</li>
  <li><span>OR</span> The active goldfish.</li>
</ul>

Like Eoin said, you need to put a non-breaking space into your "empty" spans, but you can't assign a width to an inline element, only padding/margin so you'll need to make it float so that you can give it a width.

For a jsfiddle example, see http://jsfiddle.net/laurensrietveld/JZ2Lg/

Unfortunately inline elements (or elements having display:inline) ignore the width property. You should use floating divs instead:

<style type="text/css">
div.f1 { float: left; width: 20px; }
div.f2 { float: left; }
div.f3 { clear: both; }
</style>

<div class="f1"></div><div class="f2">The Lazy dog</div><div class="f3"></div>
<div class="f1">AND</div><div class="f2">The Lazy cat</div><div class="f3"></div>
<div class="f1">OR</div><div class="f2">The active goldfish</div><div class="f3"></div>

Now I see you need to use spans and lists, so we need to rewrite this a little bit:

<html><head>
<style type="text/css">
        span.f1 { display: block; float: left; clear: left; width: 60px; }
    li { list-style-type: none; }
    </style>

</head><body>
<ul>
<li><span class="f1">&nbsp;</span>The lazy dog.</li>
<li><span class="f1">AND</span> The lazy cat.</li>
<li><span class="f1">OR</span> The active goldfish.</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>

The <span> tag will need to be set to display:block as it is an inline element and will ignore width.

so:

<style type="text/css"> span { width: 50px; display: block; } </style>

and then:

<li><span>&nbsp;</span>something</li>
<li><span>AND</span>something else</li>

<style type="text/css">

span {
  position:absolute;
  width: 50px;
}

</style>

You can do this method for assigning width for inline elements

CSS fixed width in a span

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