I'm trying to design a 2 column layout for getting a feel for HTML again.
I want to avoid using floats because I want to keep the natural document flow. Every other question on Stack Overflow I browsed through incorporate floats or worse tables. I tried layouting it with flex as well but I couldn't figure out how to make both the columns stay the same size on the other pages with different amounts of content in the first column.
Here's what I got so far: http://jsfiddle.net/wykenakw/
I figured out through trial and error that I can use a negative margin to line up the sidebar to the main content but it feels awkward, quirky and hacky. I inspected every element inside my columns but I couldn't find any potential child elements with margins that could cause this 4px gap. It's driving me nuts.
Am I missing something? Am I doing something wrong?
float is ideal because it will essentially cut out the "white space" for you. You can try and use: white-space-collapse:discard on parent elements (in this case #wrapper), but I rarely have success using it.
White space is just a "natural" occurrence created by the browser rendering. In order to avoid this (without using float), you need to simply remove the white space between your elements. This isn't ideal because of the flow and indentation of the elements, but without using float it's what has to be done.
Additionally, in my opinion there is nothing wrong with using float as a "natural document flow". You can always clear the elements.
So instead of:
</main>
<aside id="col_2">
You'd have:
</main><aside id="col_2">
Hope this helps!
http://jsfiddle.net/wykenakw/1/
Change your <main> into a <div> or use css to turn it into a block element:
main {
display: block;
}
As mentioned in the other answer actual spaces between the two elements is causing the unwanted whitespace. However spaces between two block elements is always ignored.
Related
In this blog post of mine, I needed many two-column bits, and that resulted in many elements. That caused lots of unwanted vertical space between them. I googled, and found out how to position: relative; top: -<whatever number>px. Now all the vertical space has piled up at the end. My googling did not reveal any command for negative vertical space (think LaTeX \vspace with negative argument), though that's what I was googling for. Is there any way to remove that huge space at the end?
PS I'm a total noob when it comes to web page design: all I know is a little HTML which I figured out by looking at the HTML for my other blog posts or which I googled for, and that little bit of CSS for the padding of tables. I do not know if Blogger accepts anything but pure HTML+CSS.
Update
Problem solved with CBroe's comment. Blog post originally ended like this:
Relative positioning only moves an element in regard to its “default” position (that it would have in normal flow, if the element was not positioned at all), but preserves the original space required by the element.
If you want to “move” elements without that effect, you can use for example margin instead.
This is a very basic html-css query that I often encounter. Most times, I find the solution some way or the other, but am interested to know the reason of this unexpected behavior(as per me) of UI.
Please have a look at this fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/2yaRU/
<div > //float left
Sometext <span> text<.span>//float:right
<div>
the right floated text moves to the next line though there is a lot of width available in my line. Ideally as per me, the text should appear side by side with float:left as left side, and float:right at right side within the div.
This cant be a complex issue, so is there something very common I do not get here?
Put the floated item first. The floats are nested inside of each-other, so they won't affect each-other. Floating an element automatically changes it display:block;
I think there's a couple things going on. Since the wrap is float:left, it switches to a block formatting context. It looks like the issue is that the whitespace that comes after the text (just before the nested float) is considered to be trailing since there is nothing is in the flow after it. So the width of the parent does not take into account the space, even though it does take up space when the layout is rendered as you can see in the html.
Removing the trailing space brings the X back onto the same line as the text.
http://jsfiddle.net/2yaRU/8/
If you want a space after the text, you should add a non-breaking space ( ) to the html instead.
http://jsfiddle.net/2yaRU/9/
Could someone take a look at the following link of a work in progress test page for my new website - http://goo.gl/YwGiB
I'm new to CSS, and I have come across some issues that I can't figure out without some expert help. Could someone answer me three questions and possibly an explanation of how to amend it?
1) Why does my middle column by default split itself into sections, whereas my right hand column is pretty much the same but does not have the divisions? What could I do to cause that to default in the right hand column?
2) I am looking to have a box in the right hand column running parallel to the first box titled 'news' in the centre column, and then a second running parallel underneath this (with the box titled 'blog' but it will have an irregular length. What would be the best way to do this? Would this be a case for using the standard positioning commands to shift them into place or is there a better way?
3) I have stripped the padding and margins from my h1-h3 tags (specifically the h2 tag) yet there still appears to be space above the lettering. It is more pronounced when using the font MerceariaAntique which is going to be the final font, but unfortunately I am unable to amend my html file to show this right now. I am attempting to resolve it by adjusting the line-height but I am not getting anything consistent. Is there anything else I can do other than make line-height and margin adjustments?
Thanks in advance
Firstly, in your markup, you have divided your sections using the <div> element, which is completely acceptable, however you have used the same ID to identify each of them. This is what classes are for. IDs should be unique and only used once on a page, classes can be used to apply the same styles to multiple elements.
So this:
<div id="newsitem">
should be this:
<div class="newsitem">
Answers to your actual questions now!
By default, paragraph and headings have paddings and margins set. The reason your sections have spaces is down the margin on the paragraph tag. Removing this removes the space, but also brings the text together with the next heading. You can over come this by giving the <p> tags 0 margin and giving them padding, or giving padding to the section container instead.
If you want the boxes in the right hand column to line up with the ones in the middle column, you'll have to change how your layout works so that you have rows rather than columns I think. That would make it easier to line them up.
From your description, you should then have the following layout:
middle column | right column
middle column | right column
middle column
To maintain the background colour of the centre column, you could apply the background-color property to the class .centre or to be more specific .column.centre (this type of CSS selector might not work in IE6 though).
The issue with the H2 is down to line-height, each font may have a different line-height so you will have to play with the value until you get it right. If you find you're getting the top position right, but text underneath is getting closer or overlapping, give the H2 a padding-bottom value.
I see you are using h2 and h3, but I can't find an h1 that you mentioned. I'd remove "line-height" option from your css to prevent wrong/incorrect spacing.
To run div's parallel you need to have the same padding and margin on both divs (the left and right side). To do so just create a class "floatingColumn" that would float to the left and append it to both divs with all the margins and paddings.
I built a quick jQuery image slider today, but there's one problem. The images, which are inside divs, have a gap between them, offsetting them.
I've isolated the problem here: http://jsfiddle.net/UgzsH/
float: left; gets rid of that gap, but apparently because of the elements they are in, they stack vertically.
Unfortunately from this computer I can only test in Firefox. Thanks for any help.
Test case uses http://placekitten.com/.
Floating is how you get rid of the gap, but the last floated element is dropping down because the container is too small. The reason you get the gap is because elements that are display: inline with each other preserve the whitespace you get from the markup itself - if you remove the whitespace (meaning line-breaks) you'll notice the gaps go away. This makes your markup uglier, or course, hence why you use float instead. Make your containing div wider and they'll fit.
It's because in your HTML you have spaces between the divs and such. Try putting all the images and divs in one line of your HTML without spaces between the tags. No spaces!
Hope this helps and good luck!
EDIT: Here's the updated code. It looks a bit messy, but there are no spaces any more!
For example I have a situation where I have something like this (contrived) example:
<div id="outer" style="margin: auto>
<div id="inner1" style="float: left">content</div>
<div id="inner2" style="float: left">content</div>
<div id="inner3" style="float: left">content</div>
<br style="clear: both"/>
</div>
where there are no widths set on any elements, and what I want is #inner1, #inner2 and #inner3 to appear next to each other horizontally inside #outer but what is happening is that #inner1 and #inner2 are appearing next to each other and then #inner3 is wrapping on to the next line.
In the actual page where this is happening there is a lot more going on, but I have inspected all of the elements very carefully with Firebug and do not understand why the #inner3 element is not appearing on the same line as #inner1 and #inner2 and causing #outer to get wider.
So, my question is: Is there any way to determine why the browser is sizing #outer the way it is, or why it is choosing to wrap #inner3 even though there is plenty of room to put it on the previous "line"? Baring specific solutions to this problem, what tips or techniques do you hardcore HTML/CSS/Web UI guys have for a poor back end developer who has found himself working on the front end?
It would be nice to have a tool that could tell you exactly what all your layout problems are, but in this case the browser rendered the page exactly how it should have -- the combined width of the floats exceeded the width of the containing block, so the last one drops to a new line (this is slightly different than the IE6 expanding box/float drop problem which is typically caused by content inside the float, not the floats themselves). So in this case, there was nothing wrong with your page.
Debugging this is simply a matter of walking through your HTML in Firebug and figuring out which children of a block is exceeding the block's width. Firebug provides plenty of information for this purpose, although sometimes I need to use a calculator. I think what you described about being able to see which elements constrain other elements would simply be too complex and overwhelming, especially for elements that are removed from normal flow (such as floats or positioned elements).
Also, a deeper understanding of how CSS layout helps a lot as well. It can get pretty complicated.
For example, it is generally recommended to assign explicit widths to floated elements -- the W3C CSS2 spec states that floats need to have an explicit width, and does not provide instructions of what to do without it. I think most modern browsers use the "shrink to fit" method, and will constrain themselves to the width of the content. However, this is not guaranteed in older browsers, and in something like a 3-column layout, you'll be at the mercy of at the width of content inside the floats.
Also, if you're striving for IE6 compatibility, there are a number of float related bugs that could also cause similar problems.
Try the Web Developer Plugin for Firefox. Specifically, the Information -> Display Block Size and Outline -> Outline Block Level Elements options. This will allow to see the borders of your elements, and their size as Firefox sees them.
In Firebug's CSS tab, you can see what style rules apply to a selected elements in the cascading order. This may or may not help you in your problem.
My guess would be that something about the content of #inner3 is causing it to wrap below the first line, and the #outer is just getting sized to accommodate the smaller needed space.
So I found the answer in my specific case -- there was a div much further up in the DOM that had specific left/right margins set which compressed it and everything in it.
But the heart of the question is really how can you easily debug this sort of issue? What would be perfect in this case for example would be something in Firebug that, when hovering over an element's size in the layout panel would display a tool tip that says something like "width constrained by outer element X; height constrained by style Z on element Q" or "width contributed to by inner elements A, B and C".
I wish I had the time to write something like this, although I suspect it would be difficult (if not impossible) to get that information out of Firefox's rendering engine.