text-align:center wont work with form <label> tag (?)

Answer 1

This is because label is an inline element, and is therefore only as big as the text it contains.

The possible is to display your label as a block element like this:

#formItem label {
    display: block;
    text-align: center;
    line-height: 150%;
    font-size: .85em;
}

However, if you want to use the label on the same line with other elements, you either need to set display: inline-block; and give it an explicit width (which doesn't work on most browsers), or you need to wrap it inside a div and do the alignment in the div.

Answer 2

label is an inline element so its width is equal to the width of the text it contains. The browser is actually displaying the label with text-align:center but since the label is only as wide as the text you don't notice.

The best thing to do is to apply a specific width to the label that is greater than the width of the content - this will give you the results you want.