I'm trying to put some (vertically-stacked) display:block elements within a display:inline-block element. According to the CSS specification, the inline-block element should be a containing block, so it can have display:block elements within it and those should not affect the rest of the layout.
However, the display:block elements inside the display:inline-block elements disrupt the rest of the page; so does having nothing at all within the inline-block, or even a basic element like a paragraph; only simple text avoids disruption of the rest of the page (by disruption I mean shifting other divs down, e.g. in this case the left red block moves down a line and has a blank white space above it). I'm using Firefox 3.0.6.
<html><head><style type="text/css">
#left {
display: inline-block;
background: red;
width: 20%;
height: 100%;
}
#right {
display: inline-block;
background: green;
width: 80%;
height: 100%;
}
</style></head><body>
<div id="left">Left</div><div id="right">Right</div>
</body></html>
The above shows as two panes, left red, right green, as expected. If I change "Right" to
<p>Right</p>
or remove it entirely, or (as I want to do) replace it with a couple of divs, I get the bad formatting.
Is this a Firefox bug, or am I doing something wrong, or are my expectations incorrect? (FWIW, IE 7 mangles them all equally, as if it doesn't understand inline-block; doesn't matter, this is an internal app. and I'm only using Firefox). I may be able to get the layout I want using float/margin, but I'd prefer not to have to do that.