Everything Does Not Float

Panta rhei, said Herakleitos, everything is floating. Even if the underlying philosophy, that everything is constantly changing, very much applies to the web, it doesn’t apply to today’s topic. To make an element float we have to say so explicitly, for instance like this: float:left

When we make an element floating, we ask the browser to shift it sideways, either to the left or to the right, as far as it will go.

Those who really understand the previous sentence already know half of what you need to know to use floats. There are three important pieces of information in that sentence, so let us examine them before we tackle the other, somewhat trickier, half.

[1] http://www.autisticcuckoo.net/archive.php?id=2004/12/10/floating