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
Related
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.
I've found some CSS templates where some classes have the overflow:hidden property, but no size defined. If I recall correctly, block elements stretch to fit their content unless otherwise specified. Since this is not the case, I feel that putting the overflow:hidden is pointless and I can delete it without hesitation. Is this right or am I missing something?
While that's the main purpose of the overflow property, it's not the only effect it has on rendering. The other major effect it has is that setting overflow to anything other than visible (the default) causes a block box to establish its own block formatting context.
This is mainly used to contain floats without the need for a clearfix; however that isn't the only effect of having a new BFC; there are a number of other corner cases that are better described elsewhere in the spec. Also see this lengthy write-up on the reasoning for this behavior (which, oddly enough, has very little to do with containing floats; that actually ends up being nothing more than a side effect).
So if you remove that overflow declaration, you may break float layouts, among other things. I suggest avoiding doing so unless it's absolutely necessary or you're sure it won't affect the layout.
If there are floating children inside that div, then overflow: hidden is probably there to contain them.
overflow: hidden creates a new block formatting context, and elements that create new block formatting contexts contain floats.
It may depend. if your div contains some floated elements you could use
div {
height: auto;
overflow : hidden;
}
as a workaround for the clearing. So I wouldn't delete that rule without seeing the effect on the layout
overflow:hidden can come in handy if you have a child element with a width specified which is greater than the container's max allowed width. Otherwise it will stretch the container.
See example
A common use of this is when displaying a carousel, with floated child elements. The elements need to appear inline, but hidden, so that they can come into vision when the left CSS property is changed.
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
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!
I've seen this behavior for years. Checkboxes and radios buttons can not be covered by DIV elements. No matter what z-index use.Is there some solution?
Besides, I am using simpletip (can't use qtip). If you know about another jquery tooltip ready to use that work around this... I have my wallet open. THX
Ok, now we can work.
First off: This probably has nothing to do with your problem, but it can lead to other problems: Your HTML is riddled with errors:
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnomikos.info%2Fprivate%2Fwp%2Foptions-general.php.html
Most importantly a span may not contain a block element such as a div. Most of the errors is because you are using HTML syntax instead of XHTML syntax. It maybe easier just to use a HTML DOCTYPE, than fixing all the XHTML errors.
Your actual problem is that z-index only applies to elements that are positioned (absolute, relative, fixed) and since your "tooltip" isn't z-index has no effect.
You'll need to explain what you want it to do. Until then I can just give general suggestions:
You could make sure that the "tooltip" doesn't become wider than the surrounding span. Currently it's 300px wide and since the spans are flexible it spills out, when the spans become too small.
Or you give the "tooltip" position: absolute and smaller top and left values (BTW the current top and left values are currently useless, because they also only apply to positioned elements) and it's parent span position: relative.