What's stopping this table from filling up its whole container - html

Basically this example works great on chrome and firefox but the marked table (marked with the "this table" comment) doesn't fill the whole container in IE. I want it to look like his brothers to the left. I've been looking at it for the last 30+ minutes wondering what in the world is causing it not to work. I could use the help of a 2nd pair of eyes
The whole thing is quite huge, the problem table is towards the end of the html.

The other tables that are filling up the container all have a wrapper div with a height declared on them but its missing on that one table that is not stretching. Add it and it works fine:
http://jsfiddle.net/aVkC8/1/
Oh and: Holy inline-css styles Batman!, you can greatly simplify your code with defined classes and styles for your table.

Have you tried using something like Normalize.css in order to get consistency across browsers?
From the homepage:
Normalize.css is a customisable CSS file that makes browsers render all elements more consistently and in line with modern standards. We researched the differences between default browser styles in order to precisely target only the styles that need normalizing.

Related

CSS break table and repeat first column

I am modifying a website that currently uses a <table> for a price list.
Because tables obviously don't break + wrap, on a mobile device the right hand side of the table disappears of the right side of the screen.
I'd like to use CSS to make this price list responsive, so that when the browser runs out of width it renders the next column underneath. This is simple enough if I stop using a single table and use float:left, but in this case I want the name of the cottage to be repeated (the first column) when a horizontal break occurs.
Is this possible? If so, how would I achieve it?
Peter, a better way to construct this to do what your aiming for is not to use the Table element at all.
Instead, use a series of div elements and give them the display type "table-cell" on the individual divs, along with "display: table" and "display: table-row" where needed for for rows and the overall table.
See: http://www.senktec.com/2014/01/using-css-display-table-cell-for-columns/
For an example.
Once you've broken things down into indidvidual div's, your then free to place those divs where you see fit, You could with a little bit of re-layout in the structure of the divs, put a new set down below the the first part of the table as you mention in your question.
However, once your using div elements, this actually opens up a more interesting way of doing things, by using FlexBox and more specifically "flex-wrap".
Flexbox and it's wrapping modes will do exactly what your trying to achieve, you just need to make the parent container "display: flex", add a flex wrap css rule, and the immediate div children of the container will take care of themselves.
Flexbox is fully supported by ALL mainstream browsers these days, and the various table display modes have been around since HTML4, so your not going to have an issue with any of it working. Flex also largely works on IE11, with a few minor edge cases (I implemented an online designer for a company 3 years ago when flexbox was first introduced and the target was IE11).
With the individual div approach, and if your targeting reasonable recent browsers you can actually go one step further and use CSS media queries to adjust things for different display widths
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Media_Queries/Using_media_queries
and you can even now do some feature detection is CSS too
https://css-tricks.com/using-feature-detection-to-write-css-with-cross-browser-support/
The only thing I can't come up with a possible solution for in pure CSS is the repeating of the cottage names column, although I suspect you might actually be able to conjure something up using "data attributes" and css rules targeting those attributes to get the text of the column name into an "element::before" pseudo css rule of some kind, I'd need to sit and spend a day playing with that idea to come up with anything concrete though.

How can I trick bootstrap rows?

I wish to trick bootstrap rows somehow. I need to put many col-..-.. items in only one row (there are about 8 really complicated .js files that I'm afraid of altering - and it points to children of the div that I additionally used as a bootstrap row). No way to trick the HTML, I have tried many-many ways. In case you don't believe me, check out the specific problem.
Image here
*The red boxes are the images that I'm using and the striped space is left blank. If I align the element that is on the blank row, the next one goes there and the problem is still unsolved.
What's quite interesting that Firefox and IE show everything the way I them to
but Chrome and Edge do not.
Can anyone help me on this? I'm sure there must be some easy way that I missed out, like altering some of the default bootstrap row class properties, but I just couldn't get it. Any suggestions are appreciated.
Solved using CSS Grid layout.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Grid_Layout

Two BR tags between inline images (within wrapper) causing spacing differences in Firefox vs every other browser. Example done in JSfiddle

JS Fiddle Link http://jsfiddle.net/Xfvpu/1/
Okay so I have a document with xhtml doctype and I use the proper br / tag
but for some reason the gap between two images renders differently in Firefox than it does every other browser.
The page is can be found at http://www.safaviehhome.com/Rugs/Area-Rugs.html
the CSS is all mixed up unfortunately so I can't explicitly post it, but the two images are within a DIV wrapper, and the images themselves are not in seperate divs. They both have image maps, and the size between the two images width only differ by around 20px.
In between the two images are two br /
tags, I tried fiddling around in Firebug but could not figure it out .. And I won't be happy until I figure this out .. it's pissing me off! :)
The difference between other browsers and Firefox is around a 10px difference .. Firefox adds extra spacing .. I'm not asking for any help specifically, just wanted to see if there is some rendering issues I'm not aware of so I can put this issue to rest.
Look in other browsers vs Firefox to see what I mean .. I would really appreciate some help I need to figure this out for my own knowledge.
You cannot rely on using <br/> for vertical spacing. You need to use styles, such as
<div style="margin-top:5px">image goes here</div>
Or even:
<img style="margin-top:5px" src="yourimg.jpg" />
In my experience browsers are sufficiently consistent if you use this approach.
Edited to add:
But (and I can't stress this strongly enough): browsers will never be entirely consistent. Designs which assume that 100% consistency is possible will fail. (If this seems harsh, try getting through one day using only your smartphone's browser. Yuck.)
While I do not know the exact reason why Firefox acts like it does, I can offer an advice. From my experience using br tags for layout are, er, not the wisest idea, since you easily lose control of the exact spacing it creates. Like in this case, where it seems that Firefox intreprets two br tags as two lines, whereas at least Opera take the first one as a line break after the map and the second one creates this empty space.
You didn't ask for a workaround, but I can't resist: take a look at br-less alternative.

How to display navigation tabs with the desired border? Table, list, something else?

See the picture above. Each navigation tab needs to have 2 pixels separation on either side and line up exactly with the header image on the edges.
Now they would like to introduce a 5th navigation tab (and possibly a 6th). Is it possible to code this in a way where you could stick a 5th or 6th tab in there and everything would resize appropriately with lists or tables or some other solution? Still keeping the 2 pixels separation and lining up with the edges exactly? I wasn't sure if it was possible or you would just have to define the widths each time for each tab based on the math involved to line it all up correctly flush with the edges.
I think the best way is to emulate table behavior with CSS. So you can use a list, and still get table behavior.
ul {
display:table;
}
li {
display:table-cell;
}
Here is a demo displaying this with CSS and proper markup. Here's a demo of how it looks with an actual table. I'm not certain on IE<8 support for this CSS, so it may be something to be aware of.
UPDATE: Confirmed: This is not supported on IE6 or 7 natively. You may be stuck with tables or hard-coded widths if you want to support those browsers. There may be a javascript fix to support these display values but I'm not aware of it.
EDIT: I realized my demos were sloppy, so I made another that actually addresses your point about the margins, it uses the :first-child selector to remove the margin from the first link, giving the evenly distributed appearance. http://jsfiddle.net/wesley_murch/pe6wd/3/
It may not be easy. One of the requirements in most implementations of css horizontal menu type displays is setting a fixed width for each element. If you try and do percentages, things start to come apart. However, any thing is possible.
Have you tried looking at LESS or SASS so you can do simple math in CSS?

What can't be done using CSS

I've seen quite a few answers on this site which advocate using tables for a design because it can't be done using CSS and Divs... when in actual fact it can be done with a bit of ingenuity.
What are examples of things that genuinely can't be done?
The only one I've ever come across is vertically aligning a box within another box.
*edit: I suppose I'm mostly interested in unachievable layouts using CSS2
Vertical alignment of blocks or text.
Having elastic containers that stretch to the width of their content.
Having several "rows" with the same structure where "cells" are synchronized in width throughout all rows.
Having several "columns" synchronize their height (up to the length of the longest text block).
These are quite basic designer needs that appear in even basic design concepts.
Cells/columns issues can possibly be solved with CSS if you take IE8 into account, but it will be many years until its wide spread (even IE7 in 2-3 years hasn't reached the desired market share).
As for "ingenuity", it is not that good thing in software development. Tricks that your colleagues and you yourself after a couple of months will not be able to understand usually build up that code base that everyone either is scared to touch or determined to refactor/rewrite completely.
Remember the KISS principle. The simpliest way you do this, the more reliably it will work.
The answer to this question depends on a number of things:
How backwards compatible do you need to be? Including IE6 will decrease the capacity of pure CSS; and
How much of your site is fixed-width and/or fixed-height. There are certain things in CSS that become hard if not impossible in variable width and/or height situations.
Side-by-side content is a problem for CSS. You can use floats for this but if the sum of widths exceeds the width of the container, the tail end floats will fall down below. Tables are more capable in this regard as they will squeeze columns where possible to make things fit and cells will never be split onto new rows.
Vertical centering you mentioned. Its trivial with tables and hard or impossible (depending on compatibility and fixed or variable heights of the container and the item) in pure CSS.
You may also be referring to hover content. IE6 only supports the :hover pseudo element on anchors. Javascript is required for that browser for :hover-like behaviour.
Basically if what you need to do can be done fairly trivially with pure CSS then do it. If not, don't feel bad if you have to use tables despite all the anti-table fanatics (and they are fanatics) jumping up and down in horror.
If you want a relatively simple exmaple of this check out Can you do this HTML layout without using tables?. This is a conceptually simple layout problem that is trivial with tables and noone has yet posted a solution meeting the requirements with pure CSS.
"... when in actual fact it can be done
with a bit of ingenuity."
How about 'avoiding the need for ingenuity' as a thing that's hard to do in CSS.
;)
tables should be used for tabular data! We should always try to use the correct HTML for the given content in which to markup. So not just div's (span, ul, li, dl, strong, em ... etc) This ensures that the content is not just looking right but is right (for SEO and accesibile reasons)
By not using tables it allows us to transform the content from one look and feel to the next without having to change the HTML, see Zen Garden
For now though with current browsers CSS table like layouts can be done but are tricky. there are techniques to get round many of the issues, weather they are done though global wrappers with background images, or positioning fixes... where both articles also refer to using Javascript to progressively enhance a page to get those additional classes you may require.
or of course you could use some XSL as a middle ware to help do formating if processing from a CMS.
Alternate row colors in a table without manually (or with the aid of a script) assigning alternate styles to each row.
Determine one element's position relative to another. For example you can't use CSS to determine which position one box is in a bunch of floated boxes using the same class. Would be nice to for example know if one box is the first box floated, or the second, or the last.
Handle widows. A widow is a word that dangles off the end of a paragraph, that is a single word starts the last line on a paragraph. It's a big nono on print design, but in the world of web it's hard to control.
Floating elements in multiple columns, where text in each cell can expand the height of the element, but the entire row below must be pushed down if this happens.
--- --- ---
|AAA| |BBB| |CCC|
--- --- ---
--- --- ---
|AAA| |BBB| |CCC|
| | |BBB| | |
--- --- ---
--- --- ---
|AAA| |BBB| |CCC|
--- --- ---
An image cannot placed in exact center of a cell with align attribute.It can be done with some brute force .
Sounds obvious but you can't change content with CSS, it can only be used for styling.
Rory, I think you're absolutely right. Vertical alignment can be done with line-height, and creating lay-outs in CSS really isn't that hard. In fact, it's far more flexible when using absolute/relative positioning and floats.
People still using tables for design should really brush up with the current standards.
Going on topic, with CSS3 coming up it's hard to think of stuff CSS can't do. Image manipulation, content manipulation, advanced selectors, it's all going to be possible. But if I had to name one thing, it's that with CSS you can't (and won't) be able to rotate elements.
I was unable to use a transparency to create a variable-height text area across all pages. I believe it's impossible. I ultimately just wrote a quick javascript function to reset the height after the page load, to get the layout to work. See http://peterchristopher.com to see what I mean by transparency for the text area.
There is absolutely nothing tables can do that CSS can't.
There seems to be a common misconception that HTML & CSS should be easy. It isn't. If you find yourself wanting to use tables then its your CSS skills that need improving not the technology (although the technology does obviously have plenty of holes that could do with improving).