What's the difference between CSS3 translate method and CSS2 relative positioning? - css

It seems that both of them could make the element move from its current position. Are these two methods interchangeable?

The two methods are not exactly the same thing: Translating an element will not require to change its top, left, right or bottom CSS properties, so in the same way offsetTop/offseLeft Javascript properties are not affected by a CSS translation. Beside, the position of the element could be also static (and thus no z-index is required)
If you use position: relative instead, you will change those properties to visually achieve the same effect.
Example Fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/LkLey/
Of course if you have to deal with old browser (like IE8 or FF2) the necessary choice is relative positioning, otherwise I can't see a clear convenience on choosing one of the two methods (well, to be honest relative positioning has no need of multipe prefixes -moz-, -webkit- ... to work everywhere) so the choice is up to you (and it depends on the layout).

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Fixed position background image in Firefox doesn't work with transformed element. Is this a FF bug?

The Goal: to create a fixed background position in a transformed element that works in Firefox.
I have tried all solutions on this page (and a handful of others), but none have worked:
Fixed attachment background image flicker/disappear in chrome when coupled with a css transform
Things I have tried using are static positions, backface visibility setting, z-index setting, other background-attachment stuff.
Demo:
https://jsfiddle.net/96u9xqbn/6/
.fixed1 {
transform: translateZ(0);
}
If you remove the transform above, it works. But, If you're using something like Skrollr, or have another need for the transform, then the background is not properly fixed in firefox.
Unfortunately this is not bug, but a change of scope.
There was a problem where browsers were inconsistent in their behaviour with background-attachment:fixed; inside transformed elements, which was causing additional inconsistencies with 3D transforms.
The spec for background-attachment was adjusted to include a rule that elements within transformed elements would have their background-attachment rules set to scroll.
Firefox and Edge have both conformed to the new spec, Chrome has so far not deployed the change on their side (at the time of posting this, their bugtracker shows 30 Nov as their end date)
Workaround:
The quickest and easiest way to work around this change of spec would be to use a parallax library to hit this for you. A fairly popular one is called Skrollr, and I've adjusted your fiddle to include it.
Essentially you can just add data-0 and data-10000 attributes to your element, and then initialise the library using skrollr.init();
This has the drawback of using a library for something that was previously achievable in clean CSS, but it does also carry positive weight in that a parallax background is much easier on the eyes than a fixed background.

DIV fixed from an absolute position

This is an effect very seen but i dont know how to do it, i want to have a DIV in an absolute position, for example in the middle of the page
but when you scroll down and your "border-top" of your navigator touches the div, then it comports like with
position:fixed; top:0px
Is there any way to do it only with css3? I think i can do it with jQuery and changing classes dinamically, but I'm sure there is an easy way
Thank you
It's not possible in plain CSS3 without Javascript/jQuery's help for at least a few reasons:
CSS is a language where you can only define rules that determine the appearance of HTML elements and cannot implement other programming concepts like conditions, variables, etc. [However SASS (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) does support the use of the aforementioned, but it lacks in so many things from Javascript, e.g. it cannot listen to events from DOM elements just as Javascript does.]
You need to listen to the scroll event when the page is scrolled (which isn't possible in CSS). For this listening to happen, you need to register a handler to handle the situation when that particular event is fired.
As soon as the current position from the top of the screen reaches some height (better known as offset) upon scroll, first, you may want to calculate that offset. Next thing you'd do is to add the style to the element which forces position: fixed on it. You could define the rule for this in CSS certainly, but yet again, you need Javascript's help to enforce this rule on the element.

CSS3 rotateY transition not correctly rotating about y-axis

I have the following code:
http://jsfiddle.net/RFMxG/1/
When the transition runs, you can see a padding of about 20-30 pixels on the left hand side. Despite the fact I have set the transform-origin to be 0,0,0, it is still not correctly rotating about the y-axis. The left edge of the blue box should be flush against the left hand edge at all times during the animation.
Can anyone tell me what I've done incorrectly?
Okay, there are whole bunch of issues here:
1) CSS transforms aren't animatable using transitions. If you look at the W3C list of transitionable properties, you'll notice that transform isn't there.
2) -webkit-perspective only affects the children of the element it is applied to, not the element itself. Read the Safari blog on this:
The interesting thing about -webkit-perspective is that it does not
affect the element directly. Instead, it affects the appearance of the
3D transforms on the transformed descendants of that element; you can
think of it as adding a transform that gets multiplied into the
descendant transforms. This allows those descendants to all share the
same perspective as they move around.
3) It's awesome that you posted a fiddle, but since this is a CSS problem, for future reference it would have been a lot easier if you cleaned out all the javascript, and used one set of browser prefixes only. Help us help you!
4) What you probably want to use is an animation. Here's a highly modified version of your fiddle that works on hover:
http://jsfiddle.net/RFMxG/4/
5) If javascript is your skill set, and you're at all concerned about browser compatibility (which of course you are!), I highly recommend doing these kinds of animations with jstween.
Right, so the solution was actually due to the fact the transform origin needs to be set prior to the animation starting (it cannot be set at the same time the -webkit-transform property is set).
I've updated the fiddle to demonstrate this now works correctly.
http://jsfiddle.net/RFMxG/5/

CSS layout for vertical stacked divs to use 100% of available height

I have a layout in which two divs appear stacked vertically inside a parent div which will be a specific height (due to containing a left hand menu). I wish the two divs to take up all the available vertical space. However, they must resize depending on their content. The easiest way to explain is with a diagram:
Reading the diagrams from top to bottom, this is the scenario:
both divs take up 50% of available height as this is sufficient to contain their content (this is the default).
there is a lot of content in top div and less content in bottom div. Top div expands to fit content and squashes bottom div.
reverse situation of (2).
both divs must expand to fit their content. Containing div must expand to accomadate.
I think I could figure out how to do this with a table, see the example here which is almost correct (in chrome anyway) except the outer div doesn't expand properly.
Is there a better CSS solution to this without using a table?
I cannot use JavaScript and solution must work in all browsers... including IE6 :(
.
This can be done using CSS, with a feature called the flexible box model. It's an extension to the box model that's been in use in CSS since the begining, and allows you to do stuff like vertical stacking, etc, which wasn't possible before.
You would start off with display: flexbox;, and then use other related styles to define the characteristics of the layout you want. It is very powerful. You can read the full W3C spec for it here: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-flexbox/
Now the bad news: It's a very recent addition to CSS. It actually has reasonably good browser support (albeit with vendor prefixes), but the problem you'll always hit is that it isn't supported in IE, not even IE9 (though it is planned for IE10)
Other browsers require vendor prefixes, so even for supported browsers you'll need to write your styles in four or five versions.
In addition - and this is the real killer - there isn't a good fall-back solution for browsers that don't support it. If you design your page using flexbox layouts, and load it into a browser that doesn't support them, it will be a disaster.
For this reason, it is hasn't really seen much use in the real world yet. It's time will come, but as long as IE9 and earlier are in use, it won't become mainstream.
You can see a full browser compatibility chart for the feature here: http://caniuse.com/#search=Flexible%20Box%20Layout%20Module
In the meanwhile, you're going to have to use a Javascript solution.
My recommendation is the JQuery Masonry plugin. I think this will be your best solution for now.
You could fake it using a 100% height wrapping div and a white border like so:
http://jsfiddle.net/cBV88/2/
You can also remove the fixed height and it will still work.
SuperStretch might get you part of the way there.

YUI Autocomplete renders under other page elements in IE7

I'm working now on a page that has a column of boxes styled with sexy shadows and corners and whatnot using the example here. I have to admit, I don't fully understand how that CSS works, but it looks great.
Inside the topmost box is a text-type input used for searching. That search box is wired up to a YUI autocomplete widget.
Everything works fine in Firefox3 on Mac, FF2 on Windows, Safari on Mac. In IE7 on WinXP, the autocomplete suggestions render underneath the round-cornered boxes, making all but the first one unreadable (although you can still see enough peeking out between boxes that I'm comfortable IE7 really is getting more than one suggestion).
Where could I start looking to correct the problem?
Here's what success looks like in FF2 on WinXP:
And here's what failure looks like in IE7:
Jeremy,
Sorry for this being so late, but hopefully the answer will be of use to you in a future project.
The problem here is that IE creates a new stacking order anytime there is an element with position:relative, meaning that z-index itself is not the only controlling factor. You can read more about this here:
http://therealcrisp.xs4all.nl/meuk/IE-zindexbug.html
To solve the problem, if I'm understanding your problem correctly, apply position:relative to the container that wraps your whole autocomplete implementation (and then position:absolute to your results container). That should create an independent stacking order in IE for those elements that allows them to float over the other position:relative stacks that appear later in the page.
Regards,
Eric
The working solution I finally implemented was based on reading this explanation over and over again.
In the underlying HTML, all of the blue rounded corner elements are DIVs, and they're all siblings (all children of the same DIV).
The z-index of the autocomplete div itself (which is the great-great-grandchild of the rounded corner container div) can be arbitrarily high, and it won't fix this issue, because IE was essentially rendering the entire contents of the search box below the entire contents of the "Vital Stats" box, because both had default z-index, and Vital Stats was later in the HTML.
The trick was to give each of these sibling DIVs (the blue rounded corner containers) descending z-indexes, and mark all of them position:relative. So the blue div that contains the search box is z-index:60, the "Vital Stats" box is z-index:50, "Tags" is z-index:40, and so on.
So, more generally, find the common ancestor of both the element that is getting overlapped and the element that is overlapping. On the immediate children of the common ancestor, apply z-indexes in the order you want content to show up.
I'm not totally understanding the setup that's leading to the problem, but you might want to explore the useIFrame property of the YUI Autocomplete object -- it layers an iframe object beneath the autocomplete field, which allows the field to then float above the objects that are obscuring it in IE's buggy layout.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/docs/YAHOO.widget.AutoComplete.html#property_useIFrame
But the docs say that this matters in 5.5 < IE < 7, so this might not be the issue you're experiencing. So again, without totally understanding the setup you're working with, you might also want to try to experiment with various z-index values for the autocomplete field and the surrounding block-level elements.
Make sure the z-index of the auto-complete div is a larger number than the divs that constitute the rounded corner box. Microsoft puts the z-index of the top elements to 20000 or 100000 I believe. Might be wise to do the same.
I had a similar problem to this, I fixed it by basically just changing z-index for the different divs. Just setting higher number for each div in the order it should display.

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