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 */
}
Related
I'm trying to write a CSS class that allows me to sit form elements (mixed button and text inputs) in a line so that they abut. I'm using display:table on a parent, and wrapping each element in a container with display:table-cell, and it works fine except for one bug that I can't figure out a way around.
So for example, parent is control-group, the element wrappers are control-group-item, and the elements themselves are control-group-input.
.control-group
.control-group-item
.control-group-input{type: "text"}
.control-group-item
.control-group-input{type: "submit"}
CSS of this (I've normalized font size/line height/padding/browser weirdness and all form elements are inline-blocked etc.):
.control-group {
display: table;
.control-group-item {
display:table-cell;
}
gives this, which is OK:
However, I ideally need it to fill a grid column of undetermined size, rather than the browser deciding how big my elements should be. If apply width:100% on .control-group, this happens:
The orange is a background colour applied to the table cell control-group-item. The issue seems to be with the 'submit' input: the submit stays the size it should be but browsers universally add extra space next to it within the table cell. So if I apply width:100% to each .control-group-input, I get this:
Which is OK, but stretches the ‘submit’ button. I can live with that, but is there any way to get it like the second image (but without the random space) using my current approach, or should I sack that off & try something different?
Edit I do not know the sizes of the inputs in advance: I can't set a width on them, which effectively rules out most inline block/float methods. I ideally need IE 8/9 support, which is why display:table was tried.
Edit 2: here are versions on Codepen: http://codepen.io/DanielCouper/pen/knDmC
After rewriting the code there, I realise my question is: how is the width of the table cells being calculated? It's specifically the cell with the submit button that has the extra space. The extra space seems random.
Here's a working version in codepen: http://codepen.io/mkleene/pen/ldqDH
The summary is that you need to remove the width: 100% on the submit button and then give the second table cell element width: 100%. You also need to make the textbox take up its entire parent with a 100% width.
You also need to make sure that the table element is using an auto table layout.
nm, spoke too soon. Thought I had solved it, hadn't, was getting effects from some other CSS.
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 want to make a textfield in my html page to expand as much as possible to fit the parent width. Here is an image shows what I want.
(source: ez2learn.com)
I try to use width: 100%, but the browser sets the width of elemnt as its parent's, which makes no room for other elements, they have to to be placed in second line. How can I let the element to expand as much as possible to fit all space in single line?
Thanks.
If you want to make the input ‘100% minus the widths of those other things’ you're into CSS layout stuff.
You could float: left the label, float: right a wrapper around the buttons, and set left and right margins on a wrapper around the input, then set the input to width: 100%.
(But personally, liquid-layout forms is one of the places I still typically resort to tables, as combining a series of fixed- and variable-width columns is something that easily stretches CSS layout beyond its limits.)
I agree with bobince. I would look into a table option. I would either decide on fixed:width that works for you within the table, or try to make the width:100% within the table.
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.
Given a HTML table with some data that may be either narrower or wider than the browser window,
In the former case I know how to make it expand to fill the full width.
In the latter case, how do you make it squash (by truncating some columns, not by wordwrap) to fit within the available width?
If by "truncating some columns" you mean truncating their contents, you can always make all TDs overflow: hidden, with a fixed height.
If, on the other hand, you want to get rid of columns altogether, then you´ll need a JavaScript solution that detects which columns fall outside the view and sweep them out.
Well, your question is difficult to answer. The easiest way I think for doing that is using Yahoo User Interface Library, it has a component (among many others) called DataTable in which you can programmatically add or remove columns. Here's an example that may help you.
PS: Check the other components, YUI uses just javascript and some of them are really cool.
to expand the table to the full browser widht just do this:
<table width="100%">
...how do you make it squash (by truncating some columns, not by wordwrap) to fit within the available width?
I suggest setting the table width to n% and also set width for the td's in percentages which when summed together will give the width of the table.
That however will cause the words to wrap within the td's.