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the mystery of css float property Advertisement Years ago, when developers first started to make the transition to HTML layouts without tables, one CSS property that suddenly took on a very important role was the float property. The reason that the float property became so common was that, by default, block-level elements will not line up beside one another in a column-based format. The CSS float property allows a developer to incorporate table-like columns in an HTML layout without the use of tables. In this article, we’ll discuss exactly what the float property is and how it affects elements in particular contexts. Definition and Syntax The purpose of the CSS float property is, generally speaking, to push a block-level element to the left or right, taking it out of the flow in relation to other block elements. Flickr photo by presentday The effectiveness of using floats in multi-columned layouts was explained by Douglas Bowman in 2004 in his classic presentation No More Tables: No More Tables Syntax Float in Practice