Can You Force a Line Break in Inline-Block Elements with CSS?

Introducing Line Break Manipulation in CSS

In the realm of web layout, CSS plays a vital role in styling and aligning elements. One common challenge designers face is the need to insert line breaks within certain inline content elements. While this might seem like a trivial task, CSS has inherent limitations that necessitate unconventional approaches.

Consider a scenario where you want to break a list of items into multiple columns without using float or display:table-cell properties. By default, CSS does not inherently provide a mechanism to inject line breaks within inline or inline-block elements.

However, a clever workaround exists for inline elements. By using the following CSS, it is possible to introduce a line break after the third list item:

li {
    display: inline;
}

li:nth-child(3):after {
    content: "\A";
    white-space: pre;
}

In this solution, we force a "soft" line break after the specified element using the :after pseudo-element with the A (control code for line break) character. The white-space: pre ensures the line break is rendered as part of the normal flow.

Unfortunately, this workaround does not extend to inline-block elements. Attempts to apply a similar technique to inline-block elements yield no discernible effect. Therefore, in this particular case, it is impossible to force a line break within inline-block content using pure CSS.

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