Comments on: Weird first-letter Floating Bug in Firefox

By: mrsa symptoms

mrsa symptoms — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 02:57:29 +0000

This is really annoying this issue!!!!! How on earth do you prevent the text from floating in behind the first letter?

By: ScottS-M

ScottS-M — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 03:03:30 +0000

Yeah mine was dynamic too so I just ended up dropping the idea. It was just decoration anyway but a little frustrating. If they’re following the w3c I can’t complain I suppose. I just couldn’t figure out how 1 vs 2 floats made a difference or how right floats were affecting left floats. Weird stuff.

By: Kerry Rowland

Kerry Rowland — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 17:27:35 +0000

I came across the same issue.

It seems according to the w3c, that Firefox is actually correct.

The floated element is no longer a part of the flow, and floats to the edge of the previous float in the markup hierarchy.

IE makes more sense intuitively…but Firefox is literal and does what we ask not what we want.

If you can get away with it in your content, try overflow:hidden or display:table-cell on the parent container p.test. This causes the container to ignore the floated elements and hug the first-letter back into the fold. The problem is that this causes the content to ignore the floats as well and you will get text superimposed over the right floated containers.

My problem is that I have dynamic content in articles and can never know how much text the container will have so I can’t use this solution.

Phooey