centering a div between one that's floated right and one that's floated left
Solution 1:
If you have two floated divs, then you know the margins. The problem is that the float:right div should be put before the middle div. So basically you will have:
left-floated | right-floated | centered
Now, about the margins: usually you can just use margin:0 auto, right? The problem is that right now you know the values of the margins: floated divs! So you just need to use:
margin:0 right-floated-width 0 left-floated-width
That should work.
Years later edit
Meanwhile, a new toy is in town: flexbox. The support is fairly good (i.e. if you don't need to support lower than IE 10) and the ease of use is way over floats.
You can see a very good flexbox guide here. The example you need is right here.
Solution 2:
Indeed, the important part is that the centered div come after the left and right divs in the markup. Check out this example, it uses margin-left: auto and margin-right: auto on the centered div, which causes it to be centered.
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
#left
{
float: left;
border: solid 1px red;
}
#mid
{
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
border: solid 1px red;
}
#right
{
float: right;
border: solid 1px red;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="left">
left
</div>
<div id="right">
right
</div>
<div id="mid">
mid
</div>
</body>
</html>
Here's a JS Bin to test: http://jsbin.com/agewes/1/edit
Solution 3:
Usually you can use flexbox instead of floats:
https://jsfiddle.net/h0zaf4Lp/
HTML:
<div class="container">
<div>left</div>
<div class="center">center</div>
<div>right</div>
</div>
CSS:
.container {
display: flex;
}
.center {
flex-grow: 1;
}