Float divs horzontally - css-float

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.

Related

How can I reserve space for visibility: hidden elements when they are also position: absolute?

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.

CSS Padding not working in on html5 web page

I have been searching for an answer to this for some time.
i want to add space to the bottom of my web page, as content sits too close to edge.
I have tied 'padding-bottom' in wrapper tag, in body tag and in style tag.. not working.
any help on this appreciated..
thanks,
Keith.
http://www.reddogonline.eu/av.html
you have a serious design problem.
all your elements are relatively position with top offset, that cause the wrapper and body to be actually smaller then you think. because this offset is not taken in consideration when determining the wrapper height. (so the height of the wrapper is only the sum of his children height, without the offset between them)
when you add padding-bottom to the wrapper or the body, it works (of course), but you don't see it. because your elements overlaps the wrapper..
you will be able to see that I'm right by setting overflow:hidden; to the wrapper (or inspecting your site with a tool). suddenly, half of your content disappears..
you need to remove the position:relative; from your elements, and use margin-top instead of top to make the desired space between the elements.
That way: the wrapper and body height will be set right, and the padding will work as you expect it.
You're positioning relatively all your elements. That's causing the padding/margin problems too. Why would you position your elements like this?
Try removing relative positioning and add top/bottom margins to your elements. The results will be the same in terms of visual effect.
It will also be much simpler adding new sound boxes, as you don't have to calculate a top positioning for each one.

Is positioning lots of content blocks with position:relative sloppy coding?

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

Min-height hack with floats

I'm trying to do something like the min-height hack, but I have two floats that seem to be conflicting with it:
http://jsfiddle.net/redconservatory/vqFVU/1/
My "innercontainer" div is very short, I would like it take up as much as as possible (or at least, more space) without setting the height in pixels because my page content changes from page to page...
set overflow:auto instead of visible, so that .innercontainer expands to accommodate its contents.
demo at http://jsfiddle.net/gaby/vqFVU/2/
If you want a sticky footer as well look at http://www.cssstickyfooter.com/
http://jsfiddle.net/vqFVU/4/
javascript is the easiest way. You cant do that with pure CSS since every client can have a different size window.

Hiding an element completly that has had some overflow hidden

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!

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