I’ve been using clearfix to clear floats for years now, and I always knew that it left a little bit of space after the HTML container that is was applied to. Most of the time I sort of worked around it, but I was curious whether there was a better solution.

Turns out, there is.

The problem is actually with the content of .clearfix:after:

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.clearfix:after {
    content: '.';
    display: block;
    clear: both;
    visibility: hidden;
    line-height: 0;
    height: 0;
}

.clearfix:after {
	content: '.';
	display: block;
	clear: both;
	visibility: hidden;
	line-height: 0;
	height: 0;
}

The period is appended and hence there is a bit of a padding. The way to work around that is to simply change the period into a space, which isn’t rendered by the browser, and hence there’s nothing added to the end of your HTML container.

The complete clearfix then looks like this:

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.clearfix:after {
    content: ' ';
    display: block;
    clear: both;
    visibility: hidden;
    line-height: 0;
    height: 0;
}
 
.clearfix {
    display: inline-block;
}
 
html[xmlns] .clearfix {
    display: block;
}
 
* html .clearfix {
    height: 1%;
}

.clearfix:after {
	content: ' ';
	display: block;
	clear: both;
	visibility: hidden;
	line-height: 0;
	height: 0;
}

.clearfix {
	display: inline-block;
}

html[xmlns] .clearfix {
	display: block;
}

* html .clearfix {
	height: 1%;
}

This solution worked beautifully.