I was trying to make an element not occupying any space but still visible. I don't want any possible layout-changing side-effects, which means the elements should look exactly the same after making it not taking up space.
Almost all methods provided by Google, or related answers in StackOverflow, use absolute positioning. The problem is setting position: absolute to an inline element actually changes its layout behavior.
Take this really simple layout for example:
A simple paragraph layout
My intention is to make the blue text <span> not occupying space. I set it to position: absolute:
After absolute positioning
We can see from the image that the second line of the <span> doesn't position from the start of the line anymore. It's lined up to the start position of the first line, which I assume, was to make sure the whole <span> remains a rectangular shape. But no matter what, the layout was modified after absolute positioning.
Some suggest wrapping a relative layout container around the <span>, but that won't work - as long as one absolute container is showing up, the layout breaks.
By the way, my intention on this was to emphasize a few words in a paragraph by inverting their color and background-color, and I had to make two perfect overlapping copies and style them separately in order to do so. I can't directly style one <span> because the background of multiple lines of text always overlap on the previous lines, cutting off the descenders of those letters when line-height is small, but that's another problem.
Related
I have a responsive design that mostly works. Images are in their own DIV, and that div is floated left or right. Captions for the images are in the div, so they stay with the image. By default image div width is set to 30%
If I put sufficient text between successive divs I get a pleasing display, with the text wrapping around the image.
If the images are too close, however they stack, and I end up with 2 images floating next to each other, and a tiny column of text.
The use of "clear" eliminates the text too.
Is there a way to float a div so that:
Text flows around it.
A second image does not stack adjacent to it even if there is nominally room for it.
In essence I want to float an image, but ensure that it is flush to the left margin, and not be on top of something else.
At this point my process is to try each page at multiple effective widths, and add more text/move the div as needed. This is fairly time consuming. I expect with a bit of time I will find out that I need X words between DIVS,
In some cases, I will stack multiple images within a single DIV. This works well for related images.
Example of a page with the issue about 3/4 of the way down the page.:
http://sherwoods-forests.com/Trees/Leaf_Trees/Poplars/Columnar_Poplars.html
CSS file for the site:
http://sherwoods-forests.com/2col.css
Put the floated image DIVs into the text container, not as a sibling to the text container. That way the text should float around it and won't be affected by a clear in one of the image DIVs.
If that doesn't work, you'll have to post your code - this general answer is all I can give you without the actual code...
I'm trying to vertically align some text in a div by setting the line height equal to the div height. This works just fine when there's just text in the div, and also when there's a small image in the div. But for some reason, when there's an image beyond a certain size in the div, it starts pushing the text downward. Check out this fiddle I made to demonstrate it.
In the fiddle are 4 divs that all have height: 40px and line-height:40px. The only difference is the the 2nd, 3rd & 4th divs also have images of size small, medium and large:
.small{height:20px;}
.medium{height:30px;}
.large{height:40px;}
So why are the third fourth images messing up the vertical alignment?
You need to add vertical-align: middle to your img tag, because it's not inline element, its inline-block element.
See updated Fiddle
Note that your vertical alignment method will not work when your text will be more than 1 row. Use for alignments flexbox, there are really good things :)
There a small space below every image. By default, an image is rendered inline (actually it's inline-block), like a letter. It sits on the same line that other letters sit on. There is space below that line for the descenders you find on letters like j, p and q.
You can adjust the vertical-align of the image to position it elsewhere. In this case vertical-align: middle; would be fine.
This answer describes the issue in details: Mystery white space underneath image tag
Vertical align is one of those things they never got quite right - try googling some articles around it.
My instant reaction here is to try vertical-align:middle on each of your images - but no guarantees - I've always had to experiment and you may get varying results from different browsers.
The only all-browser answer I've found is to create a 2-column table (maybe within the div box, but not necessarily) and put text in one cell (text is automatically vertically centred in table cells) then put the matching image in the next cell (which will automatically expand to the height of the image).
Aren't tables brilliant? (some people don't think so...)
so what I'm trying to do basically is have the HTML document extend vertically as I add more text, and at the moment it's just giving me some really weird problems, such as:
The body won't extend downward as I add more text
The footer isn't displaying at all at this point
There are some weird symbols being inserted into the document
The only way I know how to position things is absolute, and I don't know if this is causing some problems (such as getting text under the "Home" image?)
Here's the jFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/9nYgb/
Any help is appreciated greatly, thank you!
Absolute positioning does tend to cause problems like that. Relative positioning is simple ... instead of using the top-left corner of the document as the origin for reference, the top-left corner of where the element was supposed to be is used as a reference. So <div style="position:relative;top:10px;"> will result in the element being 10px below where it would have been had no style information been provided.
When you position elements absolutely, you take them out of the document flow. This means that other elements will act as if they aren't there. It's good for placing a modal popup div on top of a page, but it's not good for laying out a whole page.
In general, when it comes to laying out a page, I try to stick to a series of divs with height and width set. You can use margin and padding to adjust layout, and float to make items stack up horizontally to one side or the other. Sometimes I also need to set a div's display to inline or inline-block to get them to appear next to one another and act like inline elements. You can also place divs within divs to group elements together and treat them as one by manipulating the outer container(s).
In general I don't find much need for absolute positioning in a page layout.
I got a CSS question related to this fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/r584e/
Here the relevant screenshot
Sometimes I've got to style an inline element in a such way, trying to almost avoid space between rows and applying a background only under the text. As you can see, the first paragraph has a link inside, in which I set line-height: 1em . The paragraph on the right has instead a line-height: 0.8em;. (Note: I know in this way I could roughly cut some letters - like q,g,p,... but the text is uppercase so it's not really a problem)
In the second paragraph rows are actually closer (as I want) but unfortunately each row is also partially overlapping the previous one (unless you remove the background color applied) and this is not good (e.g. see the word «uppercase» on the bottom), so here my questions:
how can I get the rows closer (like paragraph on the right) without them overlapping each other and defining a background color (no matter the element in which it is applied but it has to stay under the text, not fill a whole block)
Optionally there is a way to add an horizontal padding to each line of text?
Feel free to change the CSS and/or markup. I'm looking for a pure CSS workaround.
An optimal solution should work on modern browser and, if possible, at least from IE8+
Thank you in advance. =)
Edit:
About 2nd question, using #thirtydot solution I can add space (to the right) using white-space: pre-wrap applied on the span element
Simply add a wrapper element inside the em, such as a span, and apply position: relative.
See: http://jsbin.com/axefaf
<a href="#"><em style="line-height: 0.8em">
<span>This is an uppercase multirow text inside a link element</span>
</em></a>
span {
position: relative;
}
This works in all modern browsers and IE8, but does not work in IE7.
Alright, so this is basically the usual "how to vertically center with CSS" question, but with some catches.
No Javascript. HTML and CSS only. CSS3 is fine as long as it's reasonably well supported by today's browsers.
The element's content, and therefore height, is not known. It may be anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred pixels. In the future I might even have a script adding and removing elements inside, so it may change height as the user is interacting with it.
There is other content on the page - a navigation bar at the left and a menu at the top. These need to be accessible.
The approach I've used is the three-container-div method using display: table-cell, as documented at: http://www.jakpsatweb.cz/css/css-vertical-center-solution.html this solves issues 1 and 2, but not 3.
http://imgh.us/vcenter.jpg shows the design and the problem. The yellow box is the innermost container. The red and green dotted boxes around the entire page (which have become somewhat blurred together due to JPEG encoding) are the outermost and middle containers respectively. (The out-of-place footer is a separate issue...)
The problem with this layout is the outer containers cover the entire page, and this makes it impossible to click on the navbar, because it's now "under" those containers. Z-index can move them to the bottom, but then it becomes impossible to click on anything inside the red box, because it's now "under" the page's main content box. (XHTML only allows a single element inside the <body>, so I've just wrapped it all in a <div>.) Even if the outer two containers have z-index: -100 and the inner container has z-index: 200, it still ends up under the main content box for some reason. (I did try various position attributes.)
The only solution I've seen is a new CSS3 property, pointer-events, that would in theory allow me to make events pass through the transparent containers as I'd expect; however this seems to be quite new and not yet supported by most browsers outside of SVG, and I imagine I'd have the same trouble as with Z-index.
I do want the element at the center of the page, not the center of the content area (i.e. ignoring navbars in the calculation of position), so placing the container inside the content area isn't an ideal solution. (I'm using this style on the login page as well, which has no navbars, and it'd look a bit strange if the "centered" elements were centered relative to a navbar that isn't always visible.)
In summary what I need is to center, without using Javascript, an element of unknown height on a page with other content at its edges, without covering any of the content with an invisible layer (and thus making it unclickable).
While this is obviously an old question and the OP has undoubtedly solved this problem, I figured I'd add a link to Chris Coyier's marvelous write-up on how to deal with this issue for future wayfarers in need of a similar solution.
http://css-tricks.com/centering-in-the-unknown/