Disclaimer
Lists next to floated elements cause issues. In my opinion, the best way to prevent these sorts of floating issues is to avoid floating images that intersect with content. It'll also help when you have to support responsive design.
A simple design of having centered images between paragraphs will look very attractive and be much easier to support than trying to get too fancy. It's also one step away from a <figure>.
But I really want floated images!
Ok, so if you're crazy persistent enough to continue down this path, there are a couple techniques that can be used.
The simplest is to make the list use overflow: hidden or overflow: scroll so that the list is essentially shrink wrapped which pulls the padding back to where it's useful:
img {
float: left;
}
.wrapping-list {
overflow: hidden;
padding-left: 40px;
}
<img src="http://placehold.it/100x100"/>
<ul class="wrapping-list">
<li>lorem</li>
<li>ipsum</li>
<li>dolor</li>
<li>sit</li>
<li>amet</li>
</ul>
This technique has a few problems though. If the list gets long, it doesn't actually wrap around the image, which pretty much defeats the entire purpose of using float on the image.
img {
float: left;
}
.wrapping-list {
overflow: hidden;
padding-left: 40px;
}
<img src="http://placehold.it/100x100"/>
<ul class="wrapping-list">
<li>lorem</li>
<li>ipsum</li>
<li>dolor</li>
<li>sit</li>
<li>amet</li>
<li>lorem</li>
<li>ipsum</li>
<li>dolor</li>
<li>sit</li>
<li>amet</li>
<li>lorem</li>
<li>ipsum</li>
<li>dolor</li>
<li>sit</li>
<li>amet</li>
</ul>
But I really want wrapping lists!
Ok, so if you're even crazier more persistent and you absolutely must continue down this path, there's another technique that can be used to wrap the list items and maintain bullets.
Instead of padding the <ul> and trying to get it to behave nicely with bullets (which it never seems to want to do), take those bullets away from the <ul> and give them to the <li>s. Bullets are dangerous, and the <ul> just isn't responsible enough to handle them properly.
img {
float: left;
}
.wrapping-list {
padding: 0;
list-style-position: inside;
}
.wrapping-list li {
overflow: hidden;
padding-left: 25px;
}
<img src="http://placehold.it/100x100"/>
<ul class="wrapping-list">
<li>lorem</li>
<li>ipsum</li>
<li>dolor</li>
<li>sit</li>
<li>amet</li>
<li>lorem</li>
<li>ipsum</li>
<li>dolor</li>
<li>sit</li>
<li>amet</li>
<li>lorem</li>
<li>ipsum</li>
<li>dolor</li>
<li>sit</li>
<li>amet</li>
</ul>
This wrapping behavior can do weird things to complex content, so I don't recommend adding it by default. It's much easier to set it up as something that can be opted into rather than something that has to be overridden.
