I want to have a region of my page that is reserved for context sensitive help text. It is blank, except when hovering over certain particular elements. But, of course, there are several independent pieces of text from which the visible selection might be chosen. This is in a page flow, with more stuff below it. I tried using a div "positioned", and putting help divs inside that. Each of the help divs is position: absolute; top: 0px; visibility: hidden; with the intention that JS would make one of them visible at a time, yet the space would have been reserved for the biggest piece of text in any of the help divs. Well, as most of you have guessed, because the help divs are position: absolute, their heights don't affect the height of the enclosing div, which ends up at a height of zero.
how can I achieve this? I don't want to use pixel sizing to force a height, because it's almost always wrong on some browser/font combination, and would be a bear to keep tweaking every time the help text were changed, or a new, longer help segment gets added to this.
Did I make sense, or do I need to try to draw pictures?
Yep, you're making sense. As you indicate correctly the containing element is collapsing to zero height since it doesn't contain any flow children with size. There is no simple solution to this without resorting to Javascript as obvious alternatives mean making all of them part of the flow layout, meaning the container would grow to accomodate all of the texts.
Solutions that would work:
Apply display:inline-block to all of the help texts to put them next to eachother, put them in a container element that has a width of 10000px or more as required, and encapsulate that element in a container with overflow:hidden. This way the container will actually assume the height of the largest child. Activating a text would then require moving the element in the DOM to the front so it is drawn first, or scrolling to bring it to the right position, which could be complex.
After loading the page use Javascript to measure the actual heights of the elements, set the largest one as the height of the container, and then apply display:none to the children instead of visibility:hidden.
The second option is easiest, and would be my preferred choice. It all depends a bit on your specific case though whether there's a better alternative.
Related
I am trying to float divs horizontally, however its falling into a new line.
http://jsfiddle.net/nyCrY/4/
It works only if I set width of the #holder higher than its content.
Is there a way to do this without setting the fixed width on #holder?
Thank you!
Not really with pure CSS.
You can use a static width (which you don't want to do), you can use floats + whitespace (which is unreliable), or you can dynamically calculate the necessary width with javascript and set the style's width to that number.
According to this tutorial: http://css-tricks.com/how-to-create-a-horizontally-scrolling-site/
I spent some time playing with the float property and the white-space
property to see if I could find a way to fight browser auto-wrapping,
but I didn't have much luck. Page elements which are floated but do
not have a width exhibit a property where they expand to the width of
the content inside them. I thought perhaps if I put a bunch of float
elements inside of that, it might just keep expanding beyond the width
of the browser window. No dice. There is also a white-space: nowrap;
property in CSS which I thought might be able to be exploited to fight
the auto-wrapping, but it only works for text elements, not blocks or
just any old thing you set to inline. Oh well.
So, he basically is saying, no its not possible with just css.
But he goes on to say that you can do some javascript magic to achieve it:
JavaScript clearly has the ability to manipulate page elements and do
calculations on-the-fly.
I find myself placing a lot of divs, images and content in general with position:relative to stick to the design I'm following.
For example if I wanted to place a form closer to the top I'd put in :
.form_class{
position:relative;
bottom:150px;
}
Since the element keeps its position in the flux, I'd then have to put every other element upwards of 150px with position:relative as to keep the gap closed.
I feel like this is sloppy programming, how do real web integrators position their elements ?
Thanks in advance.
There is a potential problem with using relative positioning.
If you are using the relative positioning to circumvent a problem with a gap, the problem is still there in the background. If the gap comes from a margin for example, then the margin is still there. If you don't know where the margin comes from, you don't know if it's the same in all browsers, and you don't know if any seemingly unrelated changes in the markup might change the margin.
Also, as you mention, you are just moving the gap from the top of the element to the bottom of the element, so you have to keep adjusting all the elements that follow. With each adjustment you are potentially adding another level of insecurity, where the layout might break in another browser.
Most browsers have a developer tool, where you can inspect an element to see exactly what CSS is applied to the element, and what the margins and padding are. You can use that to find out where gaps come from, so that you can remove them at the source instead of circumventing them.
There are a lot of ways to position elements, from margins and paddings, absolute positioning, floats, parent containers, explicit widths and heights. Without seeing your markup it's hard to critic but usually there are better ways than relative positioning. If you want to post some markup try http://jsfiddle.net
I am attempting to set-up my homepage with three columns (each could be different heights depending upon the content) and for some reason the columns within my 'content' div do not respect it. This causes the columns to overflow onto the information below. I have tried to create the same layout using positioning since i understand its the better way of doing things; however i've had no luck.
I tried to use the 'overflow' element which does take the columns into consideration but it then puts a scroll bar on the content element.
Please see an example of my work here
Why does it does this? (edit) - Understood
How do i get it so the columns sit inside the
content element and respect the flow of the document? (edit) - resolved
Could you advise a better way of doing this maybe using positioning? Is the method I'm using the best way of positioning, or should i be using relative, static, etc?
Content will overflow its bounding box unless you use overflow: hidden (or similar) in some cases; see overflow and clipping in the CSS2 spec
Since you are floating your three columns, you need to use something like Clearfix so that content that comes after the columns' container will clear past them. (Alternatively, you could set clear: both on the <p> containing the footer content.)
Floating is the common way of approaching multiple columns, so you're headed in the right direction. Positioning almost certainly won't help you here.
Try adding overflow:hidden to your content div and removing the height restriction, like below:
#content
{
background-color:Blue;
width:800px;
overflow:hidden;
You are floating those columns, and you don't clear the float so what is happenings is that those 3 divs are "floating" above everything else, so the browser doesn't include them in the main html. You must clear the float with the CSS clear value.
See the jsFiddle here
Also check out this tutorial
This looks a lot easier than I am probably making it sound. I have a content div, 600px wide. It is constantly, for the sake of this argument, in the middle of my page. It is set in the middle using
margin: 0px auto;
In the top right hand corner of this div, I have set a second div, which contains options (it will be share options, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.). It is currently controlled using CSS, no Javascript. When my cursor is away from the Options div, it remains as a button. When my cursor is over the Options div, it expands. I want for it to expand over my content, but for my content to still wrap around the original (in this case) 50px square box.
I have two test pages currently uploaded:
Test 1 - This displays the Options div in the correct place (set using float: right;), but when I roll over it, the content wraps around the reiszed div.
Test 2 - This makes sure my div floats over my content, but it is set using position: absolute, and it remains at the top right hand corner of the page.
I have missed something, I know I have. Are there any suggestions as to how I can get it working together? I would prefer solely CSS, but I am not opposed to Javascript, either standalone or using jQuery (I'd prefer that, since other scripts I use in my site use the jQuery framework). Code is 100% inline for this example, CSS is using and not tags, so if you wish to look, it's all there.
Test 2 would be perfect if you set position: relative; on the containing div and then added a spacer div that remained in the flow of the document: http://jsfiddle.net/sl1dr/GyvM4/
use z-index with absolute postion. Set the z-index to be higher than the content.
Try this fiddle
It's 1:30am where I am so this is not my best work. Hopefully it should be cross browser compatible.
note I changed #options to options for re-use.
http://jsfiddle.net/7T2c6/ I got it with no extra DOM. However I did move the location of the anchor tag. Outer div no longer provides style, just spacing. Inner elements are position absolute and provide all style. Just my variant. :)
Use position:absolute without defining a top/right/left/bottom value, and add a z-index value. This will keep it in an absolute position but since it's not really specified, it will remain at the required location, causing it to overlap other objects. Play with margin to move it around.
Basically I have a parent div with height and width and overflow:hidden and then within that some more divs with it.
We are dealing with fluid content and some of the divs go over the corners so get hidden.
But one is half and half.
Is there a way to make that completely hidden?
CSS would be best.
I don't think you can know if a child from an overflow:hidden parent is in the hidden or visible section without using Javascript (I might be wrong here).
What I suggest is that you set all the child divs to a fixed dimension d and set the parent div to a multiple of d so every child is either completely visible of not.
This solution won't work if you fill your divs with different-length content
If I understand your post, you have a wrapping div that has overflow:hidden and you want to make any child element hidden unless it can be completely displayed within the wrapping div.
There may be a better way to do it, but I would use a CSS media query. If you're unsure of how they work this is a good place to start:
http://css-tricks.com/resolution-specific-stylesheets/
Using this method, you could determine how many blocks of each type should be displayed on any given set of resolutions. I'd be interested in seeing how it goes, or if you end up using a different approach. Best of luck!