Sized Absolute left offset
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title></title> <style type="text/css" title="text/css"> * .grandContainer { position: relative; height: 295px; width: 600px; border: 2px solid black; } * .parent { margin: 10px; padding: 10px; padding-top: 0; border: 1px solid black; } * .common { padding: 5px; border: 5px solid black; } div.common span { margin-left: -60px; border: 1px dotted black; } span.common span { margin-left: 30px; border: none; } #myAbsolute { position: absolute; text-align: left; top: 0; margin-top: 155px; width: 400px; left: 0; margin-left: -50px; right: auto; margin-right: auto; background-color: yellow; } </style> </head> <body> <div class="grandContainer">Positioned Grandparent <div class="parent">Non-positioned Parent <span id="myAbsolute" class="common"><span>Sized Absolute: -50px</span></span> </div> </div> </body> </html>