Well, up until recently, I’d always just called on an old friend, .clearfix, and he’d sorted it out for me. I met .clearfix three or four years ago, and hardly a project has gone by since where I haven’t required his services. You know, I didn’t really ask him how he did it; he’d just quietly go about his job as I directed him, much like Michael Clayton, but without the gambling problem.

But yesterday, when I asked him to help out a colleague for me, little did I know I’d given him his last assignment.

Something happened early this morning – completely coincidentally. A little bird (or rather a tweet) came by and told me that, despite the fact Blueprint CSS uses .clearfix, .clearfix was no longer the way to go. And to be honest, it was almost a relief; the reason I’d never really asked .clearfix how he did his work was that deep down I knew that he was really a hack, and that if I just turned a blind (or ignorant) eye, then I could just pretend like everything was okay and we could all just carry on getting work done.

.clearfix is indeed inelegant, and really is a hack. And would you believe that the alternative solution is not so tricky…
Using overflow: auto; (or overflow: hidden;) on the container with a width will sort it all out for you.
Rather than explain it all here, I’ll just link to a few articles that have already put further effort into describing this:

• PPK’s Clearing floats
• Alex Walker’s Simple Clearing of Floats
• nclud’s Mind The Gap: clearfix is clearly broken

So, farewell, .clearfix, you’ve served us well.
…and thank you, MB, for the enlightenment.

It may pay to first read his previous post on this topic. And probably Jeff’s article on frameworks that he wrote for A List Apart.

Tricky stuff.

[...thanks Cameron]