How do I center floated elements?

Question

I'm implementing pagination, and it needs to be centered. The problem is that the links need to be displayed as block, so they need to be floated. But then, text-align: center; doesn't work on them. I could achieve it by giving the wrapper div padding of left, but every page will have a different number of pages, so that wouldn't work. Here's my code:

To get the idea, what I want:

Answer 1

Removing floats, and using inline-block may fix your problems:

 .pagination a {
-    display: block;
+    display: inline-block;
     width: 30px;
     height: 30px;
-    float: left;
     margin-left: 3px;
     background: url(/images/structure/pagination-button.png);
 }

(remove the lines starting with - and add the lines starting with +.)

.pagination {
  text-align: center;
}
.pagination a {
  + display: inline-block;
  width: 30px;
  height: 30px;
  margin-left: 3px;
  background: url(/images/structure/pagination-button.png);
}
.pagination a.last {
  width: 90px;
  background: url(/images/structure/pagination-button-last.png);
}
.pagination a.first {
  width: 60px;
  background: url(/images/structure/pagination-button-first.png);
}

<div class='pagination'>
  <a class='first' href='#'>First</a>
  <a href='#'>1</a>
  <a href='#'>2</a>
  <a href='#'>3</a>
  <a class='last' href='#'>Last</a>
</div>
<!-- end: .pagination -->

inline-block works cross-browser, even on IE6 as long as the element is originally an inline element.

Quote from quirksmode:

An inline block is placed inline (ie. on the same line as adjacent content), but it behaves as a block.

this often can effectively replace floats:

The real use of this value is when you want to give an inline element a width. In some circumstances some browsers don't allow a width on a real inline element, but if you switch to display: inline-block you are allowed to set a width.” ( http://www.quirksmode.org/css/display.html#inlineblock ).

From the W3C spec:

[inline-block] causes an element to generate an inline-level block container. The inside of an inline-block is formatted as a block box, and the element itself is formatted as an atomic inline-level box.