How to insert line breaks in HTML documents using CSS

Question

I'm writing a web service, and I want to return the data as XHTML. Because it's data, not markup, I want to keep it very clean - no extra <div>s or <span>s. However, as a convenience to developers, I'd also like to make the returned data reasonably readable in a browser. To do so, I'm thinking a good way to go about it would be to use CSS.

The thing I specifically want to do is to insert linebreaks at certain places. I'm aware of display: block, but it doesn't really work in the situation I'm trying to handle now - a form with <input> fields. Something like this:

<form>
  Thingy 1: <input class="a" type="text" name="one" />
  Thingy 2: <input class="a" type="text" name="two" />
  Thingy 3: <input class="b" type="checkbox" name="three" />
  Thingy 4: <input class="b" type="checkbox" name="four" />
</form>

I'd like it to render so that each label displays on the same line as the corresponding input field. I've tried this:

input.a:after { content: "a" }

But that didn't seem to do anything.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65849/how-to-insert-line-breaks-in-html-documents-using-css

Answer 1

It'd be best to wrap all of your elements in label elements, then apply css to the labels. The :before and :after pseudo classes are not completely supported in a consistent way.

Label tags have a lot of advantages including increased accessibility (on multiple levels) and more.

<label>
    Thingy one: <input type="text" name="one">;
</label>

then use CSS on your label elements...

label {display:block;clear:both;}