Text-decoration: underline not applying with inline-block span elements

Alex Guerin picture Alex Guerin · May 30, 2013 · Viewed 15.5k times · Source

I'm having an issue with text-decoration: underline on two spans that use inline-block. The [problem is only one part of the URL will underline when hovered, the other does not. I need to keep the display property, otherwise text-overflow won't get applied (see: Text-overflow: ellipsis alignment issue)

enter image description here

HTML:

<div class="details" itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Product"> 
   <h2>
       <a class="heading" href="/product/acmesw" title="Acme Super Widget">
           <span class="trunc" itemprop="name">Acme Super Widget 3000</span>
           <span itemprop="offerDetails" itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Offer">- <meta itemprop="currency" content="AUD" /><spanitemprop="price">$199.95</span></span>     
        </a>
    </h2>
</div>

CSS:

.details {
    width:300px;
    border:1px solid red;
}
.trunc {
    overflow: hidden;
    text-overflow: ellipsis;
    white-space: nowrap;
    max-width:60%;
}

h2 span {
    display:inline-block;
    vertical-align:top;
}

a:hover{
    text-decoration:underline;
    color:red;
}

jsFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/c7p8w/2/

Answer

Jukka K. Korpela picture Jukka K. Korpela · May 30, 2013

By CSS specs, the underline does not affect inline blocks inside the element for which text-decoration: underline has been set.

You can make them underlined by explicitly setting that for them, for example by replacing the selector a:hover in your last CSS rule by the selector list a:hover, a:hover *.

This will not affect the ellipsis symbol, though. It is not part of any element content but inserted by a browser, so I don’t think you can underline it.