Is there a css equivalent to 'align="center"' ?

Question

I tried:

margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;

But it doesn't center the elements in my table cells. I have a combination of text and <span> elements in the <td>s.

Once I set 'align="center"' in any of the <td> elements, it does center.

How do I achieve this in the stylesheet?

Btw, when I do text-align: center that works for text. But not for other elements like <span>s.

Edit:

The span has the following class, if that affects the alignment issue:

.dot {
    display: block;
    width: 10px;
    height: 10px;
    background: #333;
    -moz-border-radius: 5px;
    -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
    -khtml-border-radius: 5px;
}

Answer 1

I did a quick search on google and found this:

span is an inline element and therefore can't be aligned. Make it a p or a div instead of a span, or explicitly make the span block-level by using display:block.

Found at: Velocity Reviews Forumn Link

Answer 2

margin:0 auto; will work on

• block level non-floated, static/relative positioned elements with an explicit width set
• intrinsic width elements like images/objects/tables

text-align:center will work on

• inline/inline-blocks

For your situation you can probably do..

#container { text-align:center; }
#container span.block-level-spans { margin: 0 auto; }

or make the spans inside inline-block instead of block.

EDIT:

Inline-block: This value causes an element to generate a block box, which itself is flowed as a single inline box, similar to a replaced element. The inside of an inline-block is formatted as a block box, and the element itself is formatted as an inline replaced element.

Answer 3

Could you show when it fails? (may be with different display property, not sure). It would be interesting for me.