css horizontal navigation spacing

Question

I'm trying to create a horizontal navigation bar in css with 5 evenly spaced links. The html hopefully will remain like this:

<div id="footer">
    <ul>
        <li><a href="one.html">One</a></li>
        <li><a href="two.html">Two</a></li>
        <li><a href="three.html">Three</a></li>
        <li><a href="four.html">Four</a></li>
        <li><a href="five.html">Five</a></li>
    </ul>
</div>

So with CSS, I want to space them evenly within the footer div. So far I'm using this:

div#footer{
    height:1.5em;
    background-color:green;
    clear:both;
    padding-top:.5em;
    font-size:1.5em;
    width:800px;
}
div#footer ul{
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
    list-style:none;
}
div#footer li{
    width:155px;
    display:inline-block;
    text-align:center;
}

This works pretty well, but there is spacing between the li's that I do not want. That is why I've used the 155px instead of 160px for their width, there is about 5px of space being put in between each li. Where is that spacing coming from? How can I get rid of it? If I increase the fontsize, the spacing increases as well.

Answer 1

I've had this happen to me. Unfortunately it is caused by the browser taking the line breaks between the list items and rendering them as spaces. To fix, change your HTML to:

<div id="footer">
  <ul>
    <li><a href="one.html">One</a></li><li><a href="two.html">Two</a></li><li><a href="three.html">Three</a></li><li><a href="four.html">Four</a></li><li><a href="five.html">Five</a></li>
  </ul>
</div>