The purpose of clearing floats in CSS is to manage the layout of elements on a webpage by preventing elements from wrapping around floated elements when that is not the desired behavior. When an element is floated using the float property in CSS, it is taken out of the normal flow of the document and shifted to the left or right side of its container, allowing other elements to wrap around it. This can lead to issues where subsequent elements (which are not intended to wrap around the floated element) are affected by the float, causing layout problems such as overlapping or elements not appearing in the expected location.
Clearing floats is a technique used to restore the normal flow of the document by ensuring that an element is moved down below the floated elements rather than wrapping around them. This is done using the clear property in CSS, which can have values such as left, right, both, or none. By applying the clear property to an element, you can specify that it should not wrap around floated elements on the specified side(s).
For example, if you have a series of images floated to the left and you want the following paragraph to start below these images rather than alongside them, you would apply clear: left; or clear: both; to the paragraph. This would move the paragraph below the floated images, thus maintaining the intended layout of the page.
