justify-content: space-between failing to align elements as expected

Question

I needed to use flexbox to center my navigation and hence i came up with the following:

FIDDLE HERE

HTML:

<nav role="navigation" class="navbar navbar-default navbar-fixed-top">

    <div class="container">

        <!-- Brand and toggle get grouped for better mobile display -->

        <div class="navbar-header">

            <button type="button" data-target="#navbarCollapse" data-toggle="collapse" class="navbar-toggle">

                <span class="sr-only">Toggle navigation</span>

                <span class="icon-bar"></span>

                <span class="icon-bar"></span>

                <span class="icon-bar"></span>

            </button>

            <a href="index.html" class="navbar-brand">

                <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/EBay_logo.png" alt="Logo">

            </a>

        </div>

        <!-- Collection of nav links and other content for toggling -->

        <div id="navbarCollapse" class="collapse navbar-collapse">

            <ul class="nav navbar-nav navbar-right">

                <li class="active"><a href="index.html">Home</a></li>

                <li><a href="consulting.html">CONSULTING</a></li>

                <li><a href="devices.html">Medical Devices</a></li>

                <li><a href="">Servises</a></li>

                <li><a href="">News</a></li>

                <li><a href="">Contact Us</a></li>

            </ul>

        </div>

    </div>

</nav>

As you can see from the HTML , the

.container

has two child elements, I have the following CSS applied to the

.container

element:

.navbar-default > .container{

        display: flex;

        align-items:center;

        justify-content:space-between;

    }

The problem is

space-between

doesn't make the two child elements of the container to be of the left and right edges of the container, the behaviour that i want is that the two child elements should be on the left and right edge, this can be achieved using floats, I.E i float one child to the left and one to the right , also if you apply

flex-start

and

flex-end

the elements will be pulled to the edge but , with

flex-start

and

flex-end

, both elements will be pulled to one side , Hence i need to use

space-between

.

Can somebody tell me why is

space-between

not working ? This bug is causing a huge alignment issue on my whole site, please somebody tell me what am i doing wrong.

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Answer 1

The problem is a conflict with the Bootstrap stylesheet, which places pseudo-elements in your flex container. This causes space-between to see multiple flex items as opposed to just two.

Here's your flex container:

Here's Bootstrap's ::before and ::after pseudo-elements (or pseudo-flex items):

Let's put some content in the pseudos:

Remove (or override) the pseudo-elements and your problem is gone:

More details about flex containers and pseudo-elements:

justify-content: space-between failing to align elements as expected

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