How to keep text resize from affecting div height? - css

I'm working on a website where disabled access is one of the primary requirements. To do this, I've implemented a Javascript font size increase/decrease function that works great.
However, the div element where the resized text resides changes height based on the text size while everything else stays the same. Width doesn't change, but the height property set to 100% makes no difference. What changes to the CSS are necessary to keep the height fixed? so the footer content as well as the content element background stay the same?
This is the container element where all other divs are nested inside:
#container{
width:1000px;
height:100%;
background-color:#FEFFF1;
margin: 0 auto;
margin-top:5px;
text-align: left;
font-size:1.4em;
border: 1px dotted black;
overflow:scroll;
}
This is the content element, where the page-unique content goes:
#content{
float:left;
margin-top: 223px;
margin-left:250px;
height:100%;
width: 70%;
overflow:auto;
padding-bottom:120px;
position:relative;
}
EDIT changed container overflow value to scroll, where it should have been originally.

If you don't allow the containers that hold the text to expand with the text, then what's the point of letting people resize the text?
Note that text-size is not an issue for 'disabled' people. It's an issue for everyone. On the plus side, we're finally at the point where browsers are adding this as a much more usable and findable feature than in the past. As such, writing your own JS based text-resizing widgets isn't as big of a deal as it once was.
To answer your specific question, height, in CSS, refers to the height of the page (at the outer level) or whatever container it is nested within. It will exceed said height if need be if the contents overflows, unless you provide an overflow value of SCROLL or HIDDEN, which, again, defeats the purpose of the font resizing. Your best bet is to make sure your page design/layout can handle variable font sizes.

Just specify a fixed height instead of a percentage. As in

Related

Why is there no easy was to vertically center in css?

I was searching around for a way to vertically center a div in a container. I found a few different ways, but all of them seemed to be very "hacky".
My question is, why is there not just a css property, such as align-vertical that can simply be set to center to center the content? It seems like adding this to css would make so many things much easier.
I am assuming there must be a reason why something like this is not implemented, and I would like to hear if anyone has any idea why.
It's because how browsers traditionally work.
In a browser, by default, the content scrolls vertically. The viewport width is well defined (width of the device), but the viewport height can be one or two times the height of the device, or can even be infinite (as in infinite scrolling).
Traditionally blocks were meant to be horizontally oriented. You place a div and it's automatically occupying 100% of the width of the parent. But its height value is contrained to its content.
If you do
.mydiv {
background: red;
width: 100%;
height: 100%
}
Nothing changes, since divs have already 100% of width, and it can't calculate the height, since it doesn't know how far the viewport will go. You need to add:
html, body {
height: 100%;
}
to tell the browser to use the device height as the 100% value.
That's why horizontal center is easy: you know what the boundaries are, and how to center the element. But vertical center is more complicated, that's why (before flexbox), you need to resort to absolute positioning or hacks.
Flexbox allows you to render content horizontally or vertically, so it's prepared to handle centering along two axes.
If you want to read more about this, I suggest the spec:
Visual formatting model
Visual formatting model details
#outerDiv{
display:flex;
width:100%;
height:200px;
background:#ccc;
align-items:center;
}
#innerDiv {
background:#aaa;
width:80%;
margin:0 auto;
}
<div id="outerDiv"><div id="innerDiv">Hello</h1></div>
Run the script and the div remain in the center.
You can mix and match the combination like this.
Earlier you need to play with the height of the parent container and self height.
But with flex it becomes easy.
If I'm trying to center an element I do the following -
*parent-item {
margin: 0 auto;
width: 100%;
display: block;
It's important to define the width of the element you are centering.

How can I stop a css background resizing to fit the browser window?

When using a css background such as in the footer on the page below (in the elements div.footer_head and div.footer_footer), if the browser window is resized to less than about 1000px the divs themselves remain at the full width but scrolling right in the browser causes whitespace to appear where the background should be.
I was sure I'd find a similar question on here but can't seem to word it correctly enough to find it in search.
If someone could point me in the right direction I'm sure I can figure this out.
Look at how the divs with class footer_head and footer_footer behave when you resize the browser to be quite thin and scroll to the right.
screenshot http://printanomics.unbranded-nomads.co.uk/picture-2.jpg
You need to add a min-width:1000px to .footer-container.
.footer-container {
float: left;
line-height: 1.5;
margin-top: 20px;
width: 100%;
min-width: 1000px; /* add this */
}
This will mean the smallest width the .footer-container will get is 1000px. Though after that it will expand to 100%.
If you have a look at your css file you will see that the footer width is set to 100% and not 1000px as the other divs. This also applies to your background as your background won't be bigger than the div itself.
I don't know if you use this, but Firebug is a very good Firefox plugin to identify troubles in CSS files.

How can I make a div assume 100% of its containing div?

I'm trying to make a div assume 100% of it's parent div. The parent div acts as a page wrapper, so it's already assuming 100% of the page width. I've tried adding width: 100%, but this did not seem to work. I'm a little baffled, because this seems like a relatively simply thing to do.
Don't specify a width at all. For a div element (or any block level element for that matter), this will make it assume 100% width regardless what padding/margin settings it has set.
Depending on the box model, explicitly setting 100% width can actually make the element too wide because paddings are calculated into it.
If this doesn't work, there is some other CSS setting interfering and you need to show more of your layout and HTML code.
display: block;
width: auto;
Should work for you.
You need to show more of your existing css code as normally, a div takes by default the whole space available to it, provided it has some content.
Other than that, make sure you set margin and padding of the parent div to 0.
.parent{
margin:0;
padding:0;
overflow:auto;
}
.child{
margin:0;
padding:0;
}

Background image is longer than the enclosing div

On a customer website, I have to add a background image for only a contained region of the page (its real content part).
The problem is, if the content is short enough, then the image will be clipped. How would be possible to have the image completely visible? I have tried to add the "overflow" CSS attribute but unfortunately it did not help me.
Here is an example of the website I have to work on: http://www.sfp-pensioen.nl/werknemer/welkom The background image is on the div element with id="content".
On the specific link that I am sending it is not an issue because the content is long enough, but if you remove elements using firebug then the problem will become obvious.
ps: IE6 must be supported.
Following on from Graham's answer:
"height" in ie6 acts like "min-height" across other browsers.
min-height: 50px;
_height: 50px;
The example above will provide a cross browser minimum height of 50px. ie6 will read "_height" where other browsers will not. If you don't hacks, use a conditional statement.
Rich
you could either give a height to the id #content
or
apply the background:url("/images/Doelgroep-Background-Image.jpg") no-repeat scroll left top transparent; to #mainContent instead of #content
overflow for background-images is impossible, but you could set a min-height for content (or set the image in another div with lower z-index and position it abolutely to appear at the place you want - but thats a very bad solution)
The overflow attribute controls what happens to the div when the content is too big to fit - if you have a fixed-size div with some content that might overflow, you generally want the auto option. overflow has no effect on a background image.
For your case, it sounds like you want to specify a min-height on the content div. Note that this isn't supported by older browsers like IE6, which you may or may not care about. There are plenty of ways to work around this, though.
What you want is the 100% height you can achieve this with the following.
html {
height: 100%;
}
body {
height: 100%;
}
#content {
height: 100%;
}
You need the min-height and the body needs a height so every child element of the body will follow the rule.
Also by adding min-height: 100%; to all css rules will solve all your problems for any grade A browser.
If you know the #sidebar or #main will always have a visual height the same or larger than the background image then you can simply add the background image to:
.sub #wrapper #mainContent {
background:url("/images/Doelgroep-Background-Image.jpg") no-repeat scroll 0 150px transparent;
}
instead of where it is an the moment on #content

Seeking CSS Browser compatibility information for setting width using left and right

Here's a question that's been haunting me for a year now. The root question is how do I set the size of an element relative to its parent so that it is inset by N pixels from every edge? Setting the width would be nice, but you don't know the width of the parent, and you want the elements to resize with the window. (You don't want to use percents because you need a specific number of pixels.)
Edit
I also need to prevent the content (or lack of content) from stretching or shrinking both elements. First answer I got was to use padding on the parent, which would work great. I want the parent to be exactly 25% wide, and exactly the same height as the browser client area, without the child being able to push it and get a scroll bar.
/Edit
I tried solving this problem using {top:Npx;left:Npx;bottom:Npx;right:Npx;} but it only works in certain browsers.
I could potentially write some javascript with jquery to fix all elements with every page resize, but I'm not real happy with that solution. (What if I want the top offset by 10px but the bottom only 5px? It gets complicated.)
What I'd like to know is either how to solve this in a cross-browser way, or some list of browsers which allow the easy CSS solution. Maybe someone out there has a trick that makes this easy.
The The CSS Box model might provide insight for you, but my guess is that you're not going to achieve pixel-perfect layout with CSS alone.
If I understand correctly, you want the parent to be 25% wide and exactly the height of the browser display area. Then you want the child to be 25% - 2n pixels wide and 100%-2n pixels in height with n pixels surrounding the child. No current CSS specification includes support these types of calculations (although IE5, IE6, and IE7 have non-standard support for CSS expressions and IE8 is dropping support for CSS expressions in IE8-standards mode).
You can force the parent to 100% of the browser area and 25% wide, but you cannot stretch the child's height to pixel perfection with this...
<style type="text/css">
html { height: 100%; }
body { font: normal 11px verdana; height: 100%; }
#one { background-color:gray; float:left; height:100%; padding:5px; width:25%; }
#two { height: 100%; background-color:pink;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="one">
<div id="two">
<p>content ... content ... content</p>
</div>
</div>
...but a horizontal scrollbar will appear. Also, if the content is squeezed, the parent background will not extend past 100%. This is perhaps the padding example you presented in the question itself.
You can achieve the illusion that you're seeking through images and additional divs, but CSS alone, I don't believe, can achieve pixel perfection with that height requirement in place.
If you are only concerned with horizontal spacing, then you can make all child block elements within a parent block element "inset" by a certain amount by giving the parent element padding. You can make a single child block element within a parent block element "inset" by giving the element margins. If you use the latter approach, you may need to set a border or slight padding on the parent element to prevent margin collapsing.
If you are concerned with vertical spacing as well, then you need to use positioning. The parent element needs to be positioned; if you don't want to move it anywhere, then use position: relative and don't bother setting top or left; it will remain where it is. Then you use absolute positioning on the child element, and set top, right, bottom and left relative to the edges of the parent element.
For example:
#outer {
width: 10em;
height: 10em;
background: red;
position: relative;
}
#inner {
background: white;
position: absolute;
top: 1em;
left: 1em;
right: 1em;
bottom: 1em;
}
If you want to avoid content from expanding the width of an element, then you should use the overflow property, for example, overflow: auto.
Simply apply some padding to the parent element, and no width on the child element. Assuming they're both display:block, that should work fine.
Or go the other way around: set the margin of the child-element.
Floatutorial is a great resource for stuff like this.
Try this:
.parent {padding:Npx; display:block;}
.child {width:100%; display:block;}
It should have an Npx space on all sides, stretching to fill the parent element.
EDIT:
Of course, on the parent, you could also use
{padding-top:Mpx; padding-bottom:Npx; padding-right:Xpx; padding-left:Ypx;}

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