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Question

Why is there a gap between my image and its containing box?

Answer 1

+3 A:

Because the image is inline it sits on the baseline. Try

vertical-align: bottom;

Alternately, in IE sometimes if you have whitespace around an image you get that. So if you remove all the whitespace between the div and img tags, that may resolve it.

John Sheehan 2008-09-24 19:43:45

Can you explain your first sentence a little bit more? Why does the image sitting on the baseline cause a gap, and why does changing its vertical-align fix the problem?

raldi 2008-09-24 19:50:22

Jim did a great job!

John Sheehan 2008-09-24 20:42:34

Answer 2

A:

Remove the line break before the tag, so that it directly follows the tag with no blanks between it.

I don't know why, but for the Internet Explorer, this works.

koschi 2008-09-24 19:46:50

Just to clarify -- this does not work in FF3

rcreswick 2008-09-24 19:49:00

Answer 3

+1 A:

display: block

in the image fixes it as well, but probably breaks it in other ways ;)

tim_yates 2008-09-24 19:46:56

Can anyone verify/dispute that this breaks other things?

rcreswick 2008-09-24 19:50:42

It means that the image will act as a block, so any elements that should follow it inline will appear on the next available line

tim_yates 2008-09-24 19:55:01

Answer 4

A:

line-height: 0; on the parent DIV fixes this for me. Presumably, this means the default line-height is not 0.

ceejayoz 2008-09-24 19:52:01

Answer 5

+6 A:

Inline elements are vertically aligned to the baseline, not the very bottom of the containing box. This is because text needs a small amount of space underneath for descenders - the tails on letters like lowercase 'p'. So there is an imaginary line a short distance above the bottom, called the baseline, and inline elements are vertically aligned with it by default.

There's two ways of fixing this problem. You can either specify that the image should be vertically aligned to the bottom, or you can set it to be a block element, in which case it is no longer treated as a part of the text.

In addition to this, Internet Explorer has an HTML parsing bug that does not ignore trailing whitespace after a closing element, so removing this whitespace may be necessary if you are having problems with Internet Explorer compatibility.

Jim 2008-09-24 20:01:54

That answers absolutely everything I was wondering. Great job.

raldi 2008-09-24 20:15:08

Answer 6

A:

font-size:0; on the parent DIV is another tricky way to fix it.

2008-09-24 21:05:55

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Why is there a gap between my image and its containing box?

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