CSS - Make divs align horizontally

I have a container div with a fixed width and height, with overflow: hidden.

I want a horizontal row of float: left divs within this container. Divs which are floated left will naturally push onto the 'line' below after they read the right bound of their parent. This will happen even if the height of the parent should not allow this. This is how this looks:

How I would like it to look:

![Right][2] - removed image shack image that had been replaced by an advert

Note: the effect I want can be achieved by using inline elements & white-space: no-wrap (that is how I did it in the image shown). This, however, is no good to me (for reasons too lengthy to explain here), as the child divs need to be floated block level elements.

You may put an inner div in the container that is enough wide to hold all the floated divs.

#container {
  background-color: red;
  overflow: hidden;
  width: 200px;
}

#inner {
  overflow: hidden;
  width: 2000px;
}

.child {
  float: left;
  background-color: blue;
  width: 50px;
  height: 50px;
}

<div id="container">
  <div id="inner">
    <div class="child"></div>
    <div class="child"></div>
    <div class="child"></div>
  </div>
</div>

style="overflow:hidden" for parent div and style="float: left" for all the child divs are important to make the divs align horizontally for old browsers like IE7 and below.

For modern browsers, you can use style="display: table-cell" for all the child divs and it would render horizontally properly.

You can now use css flexbox to align divs horizontally and vertically if you need to. general formula goes like this

parent-div {
  display: flex;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
  /* for horizontal aligning of child divs */
  justify-content: center;
  /* for vertical aligning */
  align-items: center;
}

child-div {
  width: /* yoursize for each div */
  ;
}

This seems close to what you want:

#foo {
  background: red;
  max-height: 100px;
  overflow-y: hidden;
}

.bar {
  background: blue;
  width: 100px;
  height: 100px;
  float: left;
  margin: 1em;
}

<div id="foo">
  <div class="bar"></div>
  <div class="bar"></div>
  <div class="bar"></div>
  <div class="bar"></div>
  <div class="bar"></div>
  <div class="bar"></div>
</div>

you can use the clip property:

#container {
  position: absolute;
  clip: rect(0px,200px,100px,0px);
  overflow: hidden;
  background: red;
}

note the position: absolute and overflow: hidden needed in order to get clip to work.

Float: left, display: inline-block will both fail to align the elements horizontally if they exceed the width of the container.

It's important to note that the container should not wrap if the elements MUST display horizontally: white-space: nowrap

Float them left. In Chrome, at least, you don't need to have a wrapper, id="container", in LucaM's example.

You can do something like this:

#container {
  background-color: red;
  width: 200px;
}

.child {
  background-color: blue;
  width: 150px;
  height: 50px;
}

<div id="container">
  <div id="inner">
    <div class="child"></div>
    <div class="child"></div>
    <div class="child"></div>
  </div>
</div>