Clear float and prevent text wrap without hack

Question

I am making a list of blurbs with images that can be used anywhere throughout our site. I want it to be really flexible, not have a specified width, and work properly with no image and with different sizes of images. If the text for a block is longer than its image, I want the text not to wrap under the image.

I made a fiddle of pretty much exactly how I want it. https://jsfiddle.net/4dbgnqha/1/

Now the problem is, our senior developer told me I can't use overflow:hidden to clear the float or to prevent the wrap because:

"Overflow hidden spawns an object to wrap around the element you specified that on. By doing so it is able to constrain the perceived viewable area on that element. This invokes quarks mode in IE, which has a cascading effect for other elements on that page and how they will be interprited"

So whether or not I agree with that, I can't use it. I also can't use a clearfix hack because he said:

"clearfix dumps before:: and after:: elements into the DOM, we don’t want this sort of thing to be complicating layout, especially when we’re traversing through the DOM dealing with dynamically added elements and potential 3rd party code"

Now, I tried to find a way to build the layout without these hacks, but I haven't quite been able to get it with the constraints I want (no fixed width on the images, or the container).

Here's the sample CSS (with the "hacks"):

.item {
    overflow: hidden;
    margin-bottom: 20px;
}

.item img {
    float:left;
    margin-right: 10px;
}

.item p {
    margin: 0;
    overflow: hidden;
}

Answer 1

For this specific example you could use display: table-row / table-cell (unless your dev has a beef with this too)...

.item {
    margin-bottom: 20px;
    display: table;
}

.item img {
    margin-right: 10px;
    display: table-cell;
    vertical-align: top;
}

.item p {
    margin: 0;
    display: table-cell;
    vertical-align: top;
}

<div class="container">
    
    <div class="item">
        <img src="//placehold.it/100x100">
        <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum porttitor nisi purus, eu pretium ipsum ultricies eu. Nulla eleifend arcu dolor, et vestibulum ligula lacinia sed. Sed viverra tortor lorem, molestie volutpat nisi volutpat a. Suspendisse dolor lacus, ultrices eu quam vel, lobortis placerat nibh.</p>
            
    </div>
        
    <div class="item">
        <img src="//placehold.it/150x100">
        <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p>
    </div>
        
    <div class="item">
        <img src="//placehold.it/100x200">
        <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum porttitor nisi purus, eu pretium ipsum ultricies eu. Nulla eleifend arcu dolor, et vestibulum ligula lacinia sed. Sed viverra tortor lorem, molestie volutpat nisi volutpat a. Suspendisse dolor lacus, ultrices eu quam vel, lobortis placerat nibh.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum porttitor nisi purus, eu pretium ipsum ultricies eu. Nulla eleifend arcu dolor, et vestibulum ligula lacinia sed. Sed viverra tortor lorem, molestie volutpat nisi volutpat a. Suspendisse dolor lacus, ultrices eu quam vel, lobortis placerat nibh.</p>
    </div>
        
    <div class="item">
        <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum porttitor nisi purus, eu pretium ipsum ultricies eu. Nulla eleifend arcu dolor, et vestibulum ligula lacinia sed. Sed viverra tortor lorem, molestie volutpat nisi volutpat a. Suspendisse dolor lacus, ultrices eu quam vel, lobortis placerat nibh.</p>
    </div>
        
    <div class="item">
        <img src="//placehold.it/100x100">
        <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum porttitor nisi purus, eu pretium ipsum ultricies eu. Nulla eleifend arcu dolor, et vestibulum ligula lacinia sed. Sed viverra tortor lorem, molestie volutpat nisi volutpat a. Suspendisse dolor lacus, ultrices eu quam vel, lobortis placerat nibh.</p>
    </div>
    
</div>

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Fiddle version

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Browser support is pretty universal - CANIUSE