Page breaks on zooming in - HTML / CSS / browser issue - html

I have simple page using a two-column page layout that breaks on zooming. Here it is - try zooming in with cmd+:
http://jamesabbottdd.com/ems-with-max-width.html
The header breaks on the right side, causing a horizontal scrollbar to appear. Originally I thought this was due to using pixels for sizing elements and setting max-width. This article is about that very problem:
http://blog.cloudfour.com/the-ems-have-it-proportional-media-queries-ftw/
Then I overrode pixels with ems but the problem persists.
This intrigues me to no end. I’ve been using CSS for about a decade now, the last 3 years on a high level, but haven’t yet figured out why the above page breaks but this one:
http://framelessgrid.com/
does not, regardless of how closely I zoom in.
Any help greatly appreciated.

Hmmm, it looks a bit like you've inadvertently linked together two slightly unrelated observations, making it a bit more difficult to diagnose the actual problem.
Separating the Symptoms
Based on your screenshot, it does appear that your header is coming up with some visual glitches. Additionally, a horizontal scrollbar appears - but rest assured that this is not due to any property of your header. In fact, it is due to your wrapper div below the header, which has a width of 1130px. So when you zoom in that much, it can't all show on the screen, and thus creates the scrollbar.
The True Issue
Returning to the problem with your header though, the reason why the colour is disappearing is because your header div has a width of 100%. If, when you took that screenshot, you were scrolled all the way to the left, you would have seen no problem with the header's background colour, because it would have covered 100% of the browser's width. (If you're wondering where this width of 100% came from, it's due to the h1 element inside the header; an h1 generally has a default width of 100%, a style you wouldn't be able to see even with an element inspector like Firebug open.)
Note that the site you provided does not display this issue due to a few things: first, its header doesn't have a background colour, so you wouldn't see any kind of issue in that respect (if it did have one though, you'd immediately see that the div doesn't actually span the whole screen as yours does; it is only a little wider than the text within, and has a fixed width. The title is centred not through only usage of the h1 element's width of 100% and text-align:center, but is also due to the margin:0 auto applied to the header div. But now, how to fix your issue?
A Solution
With the current structure of your page, the easiest solution would be to give your header div a defined width. Well, not a width per se, but rather a min-width, one which is identical to the width of your wrapper div. If you give it the style of min-width:1130px, you should see your problem solved.
I hope this was helpful! (Sorry if it was a little long to read, though.)

Related

Can you control mobile Chrome's "inferred layout height" (for horizontal layouts)?

Lacking better terms for the problem, this question got a bit long. Sorry!
I've been trying to build a simple horizontal layout with a bunch of <div>s with width: 100%; height: 100% next to each other ("screens" of an app that you can swipe).
In Chrome's responsive preview, as well as on a real device, empty space appeared below the <div>s — no invisible objects, no traces of the excess height in any DOM properties.
Here's a gist, try it via bl.ocks.org. Scrolled all the way down, it looks like this:
Red/blue are the divs, yellow is bodys background-color.
In a related answer I found this:
Chrome infers the layout height using the width and screen's aspect ratio. i.e. height=width/aspectRatio
Which means that if my content is wider than the viewport, a minimal height will be calculated for it. I find this weird, and came up with workarounds:
set html, body { overflow-y: hidden}
put all children of <body> inside a <div> wrapper
Since both methods have downsides or aren't always applicable, I am wondering: is there a way to control this behavior, like, set the inferred layout height to "auto"?

Positioning being broken when zoomed out

Recently we've had some customers complain about our website positioning being messed up and we've since found out that this problem only occurs when their browser is zoomed out to around the 75% mark. Most of our customers do not realise that their browsers are set to zoomed out mode, and we have been told to fix the problem so positioning is consistent regardless of the zoom level.
I have tried resizing elements using em and also tried in % but the positioning still messes up.
Here is a link to the website:
http://www.comms-express.com
The issue occurs on all pages - the 'Need Assistance' box at the top right of the page falls off at 75% zoom, and the main boxes on product pages do not fit in the container at 75% zoom.
Could anyone give me some pointers? I'm looking for some kind of CSS media query which would allow me to change CSS rules on specific zoom levels.
Thanks!
This seems to mainly be effecting your .product elements, change their width from its current setting of 190.5px; to 23% so they scale proportionately.
.product {
width: 23%;
}
This is likely more of a quick fix than anything else, but should solve the position issue until a more permanent solution is found.
I managed to solve this problem by modifying widths of elements to use percentages instead of pixels, and by re-tweaking how elements were spaced. Instead of using a margin, I placed a smaller inner container and gave this a padding which generally resolved most problems.

Which CSS definition is stopping the left sidebar DIV from growing in height?

I am having a problem determining which CSS class definition is stopping the left sidebar (the one with the pinkish background) from growing in height on this page.
I should have mentioned previously that I have tried everything I can think of and researched many questions on here, including adding height:auto; and overflow:auto; to col-left, sidebar, col-main and all others already.
Can someone help me identify it?
At a glance, I think the main problem is the use of position:absolute for .col-left. position:absolute causes that element to be outside of the flow of the rest of the page. The height of it has no effect on the resulting height of its parent (as if it were not inside the parent).
You have a lot of height values set to 100%, it took me going all the way to the page div class before I was able to increase the vertical real estate of your content.
I recommend evaluating whether you should be using that particular height property in so many elements, you may be constraining yourself with no reason.
Looking at the page source, the height of the element is not specified via CSS. If you would like the sidebar to grow, you would need to specify a height and/or min/max-height properties.

100% height div cutting off div inside

I am developing a website which is 100% height and width. There is a panel stuck to the left and the main content area to the right, which is scrollable.
However, in the content area the last div inside is getting cut off. I cannot see why. I have tested this on Firefox and Chrome, both are doing the same.
Here's the link to see it:
removed
As you can see, it is cut off, adding a large margin-bottom (50px +) seems to fix it, but that just looks bad.
PS: Don't worry about the missing images, it's because I've only uploaded this page, not the entire website.
Thanks in advance
Height: 100%; is fairly inconsistent across most browsers. Try to avoid it.
I'm not entirely sure how your layouts usually work, but setting overflow: hidden; on everything in your CSS reset is going to make things wonky from the start.
Take out "overflow: hidden;" and you can see the problem. Your content pane is matching the height of your body, as such, you're losing the height of "topBar" on the bottom of the page. because the Body is hiding the overflow.
Yup -- try overflow:scroll; or overflow:visible; In addition, I'd see if you can make it work without float:right;, 'cos that takes it out of the normal flow of things and can wreak havoc with your box adjustments.
ETA: I think I see the problem; each of your little content divs has floats left and right, which is gonna render margins useless, 'cos as far as the browser is concerned, each box's content is out of the normal flow of the page.
ETA(2): You have overflow:hidden; in your big first rule, where you set default styles for like a hundred different elements. That's your main problem. Change that to overflow:visible; (or whatever you prefer) and set appropriate overflow properties elsewhere and you oughta be good. I was able to mitigate the issue by doing this. There's still tweaking required, but that solves the base problem. I would still get rid of the inline floats, too.
From main-style.css line 5:
overflow:hidden
and main-style.css line 127:
overflow-y:auto
are both causing the page to cut off the bottom. However, when you correct this, it reveals that your wrapper div isn't stretching to 100% of the window height (because the background gradient stops WAY before the page ends), and the content inside your main divs go wonky. These are things that the other posters have discussed being major obstacles in your page formatting correctly.
Please take a look at this JsFiddle here. It is working in Chrome, FF, IE 6-8 and Safari.
Not sure how to fix the 100% height problem yet, but to solve the floated div content problem, make sure you declare a width of 50% on both the left and right-floated content
(also, you can make the right-floated content text-align:right in order to make it REALLY stay to the right of the div).
<div class="centerText messageWrapper">
<div class="messgaeHeader">
<div style="float:left; width:50%">
From: 12345678<br />
</div>
<div style="float:right; width:50%; text-align:right">
Date: 123456789<br />
</div>
</div>
1234567890
</div>
Perhaps someone could chime in with a fix for the 100% height issue this is causing now. I realize this isn't a complete answer, and my solution breaks the page in a different way, but perhaps it will be a jumping off point to you or someone else who may have the solution.

Navigation breaks on hover in IE

I'm having a slight problem. Whenever I hover over the "SEO" option on my navigation in IE, the navigation breaks & moves to the side. This doesn't happen in Firefox. Changing the navigation to position:absolute fixes it, but then the main content becomes merged with the navigation. It all validates. Any help would be much appreciated!
http://www.joemarketeer.com
http://jsfiddle.net/eoJ1/Ra4tR/
Thanks loads!
The navleft and navright divs are resizing independently, which is to be expected given your design structure. But it looks weird as it comes down on top of the content below:
One suggestion I can give you is not to set the navigation bar width in %, which you have done for these two divs. If you set a fixed width (in px) or remove the width specification completely (in which case it will take the width of its inner content), a horizontal scrollbar will appear below the page when the width is small, which I suppose is fine. Also, use as few floats as possible as they break the flow of content in the document and are more prone to breaking layouts. Both these divs have a float:left, which can be dumped for more stable solutions. I'm saying all this because I think the breaking of the layout on hover is occurring due to these reasons. If you can take care of this, your problem might disappear.
So my suggestion is to have a single nav div with width: 100%. Inside this put two divs: navleft and navright with display:inline and widths a.) specified in px or not at all, or b.) specified in % but with some min-width in px. If you don't specify any width for navright, it will expand to fill all of the space on the right.
This way these two divs will not reflow independently.
Basically, toy around more until you get better command over CSS; I think more experience will automatically help you sort out issues like this.