Shrinkwrapped SPAN by setting both width and height to auto
<!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> <title></title> <style type="text/css"> #float { width: auto; height: auto; float: left; background: red; } </style> </head> <body> <span id="float">Shrinkwrapped Float</span> </body> </html>