Vertically align text next to an image?

Question

Why won't vertical-align: middle work? And yet, vertical-align: top does work.

<div>
   <img style="width:30px;height:30px">
   <span style="vertical-align:middle">Doesn't work.</span>
</div>

Answer 1

On a button in jQuery mobile, for instance, you can tweak it a bit by applying this style to the image:

.btn-image {
    vertical-align:middle;
    margin:0 0 3px 0;
}

Answer 2

The technique used in the accepted answer works only for single-lined text (demo), but not multi-line text (demo) - as noted there.

If anyone needs to vertically center multi-lined text to an image, here are a few ways (Methods 1 and 2 inspired by this CSS-Tricks article)

Method #1: CSS tables (FIDDLE) (IE8+ (caniuse))

CSS:

div {
    display: table;
}
span {
    vertical-align: middle;
    display: table-cell;
}

Method #2: Pseudo element on container (FIDDLE) (IE8+)

CSS:

div {
   height: 200px; /* height of image */
}

div:before {
  content: '';
  display: inline-block;
  height: 100%;
  vertical-align: middle;
  margin-right: -0.25em; /* Adjusts for spacing */
}

img {
    position: absolute;
}

span {
  display: inline-block;
  vertical-align: middle;
  margin-left: 200px;  /* width of image */
}

Method #3: Flexbox (FIDDLE) (caniuse)

CSS (The above fiddle contains vendor prefixes):

div {   
    display: flex; 
    align-items: center;    
}
img {
    min-width: 200px; /* width of image */
}