Spans and Width

[dembonez]

I have just recently gotten back into web development and what I know is pretty antiquated, pretty much I am learning xhtml and css to get out of the habit of using tables for everything.

My question is this. When working with my style sheet I try and set, for this problem, a spans width and height but no matter what I do it clips itself down to the actual length of the content inside of the span instead of using the width and height I gave it through an ID or class (tried both). Is there anyway to work around this?

If you need code examples let me know. The page I am designing has no purpose then to play with css and xhtml.

[Lerura]

a <span>'s only purpose is to enable character formatting.
therefore it cannot be uses as a container.

use <div>'s instead

[mark87]

A span is an inline element so you can't give it a set width.

Only way is to set it to display:block. Alternatively you could give it left and right margins.

[dembonez]

Thanks guys. On that note is it possible to make divs inline like you can with lists?

[dembonez]

Got it figured out. Thanks again.

[mark87]

What did you do in the end? :)

[dembonez]

I messed with the div margins to only effect the divs inside of an ID I made. So they dont have that huge space they put in between. They are not inline but works to my liking this way too.

Now I just have to figure out how to get firefox to push text in when I use right padding instead of making the box bigger if the style has text right-aligned.