Absolute centered
<!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; background: red; } * .parent { margin: 10px; padding: 10px; padding-top: 0; border: 1px solid black; background: purple; } #myStyle { position: absolute; text-align: center; top: 0; margin-top: 200px; width: auto; left: 0; margin-left: 110px; right: 0; margin-right: 30px; background-color: gold; } </style> </head> <body> <div class="grandContainer">Positioned Grandparent <div class="parent">Non-positioned Parent <span id="myStyle" >absoluted centered.</span> </div> </div> </body> </html>