This question is related to an issue I got recently creating a textarea to fit a containing div. The issue itself has now come to a resolution, though I'm still interested in an answer to this question: How can one get a textarea's sizing (or really, most other elements) to match that of a div? For a decent example, take a look at my JSFiddle.
http://jsfiddle.net/sqW73/1/
The first "pyramid" only defines the width at its outermost. The others shrink their content appropriately based on the amount of padding they've been given.
I understand that the box-sizing: border-box property would be the quickest way to accomplish what I'm looking for: width means the size of the content plus the size of the padding. However, my impression is that border-box is just meant to be a "quick-fix" for pages that were relying upon what people saw as IE6's broken box model. If content-box is supposed to be a reliable default, then what is the expected manner in which people should be sizing things like textboxes? Is there a separate unit type from % that someone could use to essentially give it the div's default state?
I'm a bit pressed for time at the moment, but hopefully what I've given outlines the question in enough detail...?
Related
I'm trying to get more efficient with building responsive websites and since I'm using Bootstrap (not particularly important for this case - I believe), I was looking into Bootsnipp. I decided to view the site's source and noticed one thing I've never seen before: they did not set a height for any of their containers except for the whole page wrapper and the footer. This baffles me because everything falls into place with the website and it's super repsonsive. I understand the elements where they use Bootstrap's classes like "col-sm-4" and whatnot but does anyone understand the art of making the header, a content container, etc calculate heights without specifying in css? Can anyone explain this concept? I tried Googling but not sure of the correct keywords to find answers.
Also, if you need to see yourself, here is the link to their CSS.
Thanks
Understanding the Box Model is important. As an (overly simplified) rule of thumb, you can think of it like this; there are 2 primary types of elements: inline (span, b, strong, ...) and block (div, p, ...).
Block tags by default are width: 100%. That is to say they will naturally stretch to fill their horizontal area.
Inline tags you can think of as being constricting. They shrik to fit the size of their inner elements. This makes sense when you think of a bold tag: it is not unlike highlighting the text you want to be bold. It stays small to fit the content.
In both cases, though, unless you specify a height, both block and inline tags will shrink their height to fit their inner elements. Because of this, you can think of a website as being a bunch of elements stacked on top of each other, where the top of the page is the bottom of the "stack".
Here is an example of divs without specified heights having their heights changed by the size of the interior content. http://jsfiddle.net/S3q2C/ Notice all the divs have a border to easily see its relative size.
If you don't set an explicit height, containers will automatically grow to fit the content (respectively). Sometimes this is desirable, other times not (think overflow hidden). A possible reason why people use explicit heights in containers could be because of absolute positioning, or if they want to align a nested element that is 50px tall, with another that is 200px tall. An explicit height could also be used to maintain perspective say for a picture or other element (maybe a series of elements). While this answer is the end all be all you might be looking for, the key thing I'm trying to pass along is that an explicit height is used when needed, not all the time.
Here's a quick demo showing you two <div> containers, one with a height set, and another with no height.
http://jsfiddle.net/xrZ73/1/
I'm rendering a form in a table with the labels in tags (left) and text inputs in tags (right of labels).
For the sake of flexibility, I'd like to write as little css as possible and have everything magically fall into place, such that:
the cells expand to accomodate the width of the longest label
the fields on the right expand to fill the whole width of the cell
I've been trying various combinations of width:100% and width:auto on these various elements but to no avail. Is doing this possible, or should I just give up and specify hard widths like width:Npx?
Not sure what your code looks like (if you post, answers are so much better...).
Anyway: cells will expand naturally to the width of the longest element if no width is specified, BUT you can't have the element expand to the width of the cell at the same time! That would make the calculation of the width impossible. So I'd recommend fixing the inner content somehow. Input fields look great when they are all the same length...
You have two options as far as I'm concerned. Either you implement a solution with tables that allows you to have fluid lengths for your labels, or you set them as fixed widths and use table-less markup. I personally see no compelling reason to choose one solution over the other, although some web developers will do almost anything to avoid using <table> elements in their markup.
That being said, this solution is quite easy if you are using tables: http://jsfiddle.net/Wexcode/VcSXU/
td:first-child {
white-space: nowrap; /* don't allow text to wrap to the next line */
}
I have 4 elements inside a container element. The container element will have its height set to 100% of the browser window. The 4 inner elements will appear vertically stacked on each other (as normal). The first two elements and the last element should have a "natural" height (ie: enough to fit their contents). The 3rd element should expand to fill the space available in the container, after the other 3 eat all they need to.
So, it would look something like this:
I cannot set explicit heights for Element-1, Element-2, or Element-4, nor do I know the height of the Container. I don't know the natural height of Element-3 either; I plan on using overflow-scroll if it gets larger then what's available. I've added spacing between the elements for illustration, but there will be spacing (margins/padding) between the real elements too.
How do you achieve this using HTML/CSS? If compromises have to be made to get a decent layout, I'll consider them. Bonus points if the technique also applies horizontally (which I've needed on occasion).
First off, great visual.
Secondly.. would a javascript solution be out of the question?
Update
This was just intended to be a sample, but I have updated the code to appease some of the more picky people out there.
http://jsfiddle.net/tsZAV/9/
There are a number of things that make this impossible in pure css.
The browser window could be shorter than the dynamic height of the first 3 elements.
There is no way to force an element to take up the rest of the container's height.
CSS is a document styling language, not a programming language. Think of writing CSS as a set of guidelines that the page should try to follow, rather than a way of explicitly setting sizes (although you can explicitly set sizes).
This is relatively simple to do with JavaScript resizing the fourth element. You'll have to listen for a resize event so that the fourth element gets sized accordingly. Also, you'll want to set a min-height value for element-4, in case there isn't enough space for the fourth element.
There are a lot of questions about formatting forms so that labels align, and almost all the answers which suggest a pure CSS solution (as opposed to using a table) provide a fixed width to the label element.
But isn't this mixing content and presentation? In order to choose the right width you basically have to see how big your longest label is and try a pixel width value until "it fits". This means that if you change your labels you also have to change your CSS.
I have no problem (Gasp! Heresy!) with using tables to line up form elements and their labels. If that makes me a Luddite, then so be it. I feel it can be argued that arrays of label/input pairs are sufficiently tabular to be rendered with tables.
Your labels can still word-wrap, thus allowing them to be very short or very long. You're not limiting your content in any way at all (almost), you're just dictating how they will be displayed.
Fixed widths don’t have to be in pixels. em is a valid and better unit for containers with text.
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.