html - div with unspecified width (absolute positioning)

Question

I've got an absolutely positioned div I'm working with, and I put some text inside of it just to be able to find it on the page, namely:

<div style="position:absolute; top:10px; left:500px; font-size:30px; ">Example Text </div>

The text ends up wrapping, i.e. "Example" and "Text" are on a different line. There are no scroll bars showing in my Firefox browser, in fact it's width is about 1000px. Does one have to set a width on divs? Don't they expand to hold their content?

In case it helps, I included the Firebug CSS output for this element here:

element.style {
      font-size: 30px;
      left: 500px;
      position: absolute;
      top: 10px;
}
html * {
    margin: 0;
}              //  main.css (line 1)

Inherited from body:

body {
    color: #333333;
    font: 11px verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;
}

Thanks

Answer 1

Try adding:

white-space: nowrap;

in your fixed positioned div. Beware, though, that this solution will not cause the lines to wrap when the div is smaller than the window's width.