Alright, so this is basically the usual "how to vertically center with CSS" question, but with some catches.
No Javascript. HTML and CSS only. CSS3 is fine as long as it's reasonably well supported by today's browsers.
The element's content, and therefore height, is not known. It may be anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred pixels. In the future I might even have a script adding and removing elements inside, so it may change height as the user is interacting with it.
There is other content on the page - a navigation bar at the left and a menu at the top. These need to be accessible.
The approach I've used is the three-container-div method using display: table-cell, as documented at: http://www.jakpsatweb.cz/css/css-vertical-center-solution.html this solves issues 1 and 2, but not 3.
http://imgh.us/vcenter.jpg shows the design and the problem. The yellow box is the innermost container. The red and green dotted boxes around the entire page (which have become somewhat blurred together due to JPEG encoding) are the outermost and middle containers respectively. (The out-of-place footer is a separate issue...)
The problem with this layout is the outer containers cover the entire page, and this makes it impossible to click on the navbar, because it's now "under" those containers. Z-index can move them to the bottom, but then it becomes impossible to click on anything inside the red box, because it's now "under" the page's main content box. (XHTML only allows a single element inside the <body>, so I've just wrapped it all in a <div>.) Even if the outer two containers have z-index: -100 and the inner container has z-index: 200, it still ends up under the main content box for some reason. (I did try various position attributes.)
The only solution I've seen is a new CSS3 property, pointer-events, that would in theory allow me to make events pass through the transparent containers as I'd expect; however this seems to be quite new and not yet supported by most browsers outside of SVG, and I imagine I'd have the same trouble as with Z-index.
I do want the element at the center of the page, not the center of the content area (i.e. ignoring navbars in the calculation of position), so placing the container inside the content area isn't an ideal solution. (I'm using this style on the login page as well, which has no navbars, and it'd look a bit strange if the "centered" elements were centered relative to a navbar that isn't always visible.)
In summary what I need is to center, without using Javascript, an element of unknown height on a page with other content at its edges, without covering any of the content with an invisible layer (and thus making it unclickable).
While this is obviously an old question and the OP has undoubtedly solved this problem, I figured I'd add a link to Chris Coyier's marvelous write-up on how to deal with this issue for future wayfarers in need of a similar solution.
http://css-tricks.com/centering-in-the-unknown/
Related
I am pretty new to HTML and CSS, and one of the things I have read is that you should keep your <header> and <main> tags separate. When I do this, however, it makes it harder for me to align content on a page the way I want. Currently I'm having issues with the content of the main overlapping with the content of the header elements, and they are both occupying the same space. I tried setting the :root to display: flex;, and then flex-direction: column;, but this didn't seem to prevent the elements from overlapping. I would like them to behave as if the header and main were both in the same flexbox and aligned in a single column, but so far I haven't seen anything addressing this issue. I have attached a Codepen link of what I have so far (the borders in the CSS were just to help me visualize where things were going wrong).
After continuing to mess around with some of the values in the CSS selectors, I found that the one causing the issue was the position: fixed. I knew that I wanted the nav-bar to remain at the top of the screen when scrolling, but I didn't fully understand the implications of having other elements in the same page as a fixed element, without using a relative parent.
When I used position: fixed; it caused that element to essentially be disregarded from the normal flow of the page, and other elements filled the top, making them appear stacked on top of one another. In my particular case, I chose to go with sticky instead, as this accomplishes the same objective without complications.
First off, i'm not really a good coder. I'm an IT but more of an infra guy but i do understand concepts about coding and maybe a bit of a good grasp about it. I am working with my website and it's under construction using wordpress. In my homepage, i plan to do it simple as it is and decided to use the page builder and use text or HTML (or any language) to maximize it. I hope some one can help me. I would really appreciate it.
Here it is:
homepage
Those images have onmouseover style and was able to do it.. the thing is i can't arrange it horizontally. :( and unable include arrow so they can move left or right to see each images :(.
I know i can also do the same on the icon part the moment someone help me about the concept i wanted.
Your question is pretty ambiguous as to the specific context of the solution.
However, in general the reason why things don't align horizontally when rendered on screen in a browser, is that most elements (including the popular <div>) have a default styling of display: block; which makes it take up the full width of its parent item if the parent itself has the same styling (cascading of this is a different discussion).
The general solution to this is to define the widths of the elements. And they will be placed on the same line to the extent that the widths of the elements allow for more than one to appear on the same line.
One way to solve this is to have elements widths defined in some way. This could be by applying a class with a width: 25%; for example. This would allow for 4 elements with the same width to fit on the line.
Alternately you can also set the display property value of the elements you want on the same line to inline-block. This will make those elements take the width of it's content (unless the content has no width specified). This will cause the elements to flow along the horizontal line like text would (it will re-flow on the resizing of it's parent element), until there are no more contiguous items containing the inline-block display property.
Since your description also showed carousel style navigation for these rows of items, it may be that these are not the full solutions you are looking for.
If you are using the Bootstrap framework, there is a built-in carousel feature which you could use to contain these horizontally aligned elements on separate "pages" of the carousel. Making this solution fully responsive is another challenge altogether.
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 am trying to remove the background image in the header area of this site and place a rectangular javascript ad on the right of the logo. The various div blocks that the header area consists of are extremely confusing and any content I place next to the logo end up beneath it instead of on the right, even if it's a a few characters of text. There seems to be plenty of room to the right of the logo, so I'm not sure what's wrong.
There's nothing strange going on here; your logo element (#rt-logo) is a block element, which by default doesn't allow inline elements to be positioned next to it. You can either absolutely position your ad box - the parent div of class .rt-omega is relatively positioned, making this simple - or you could give #rt-logo either a float: left; or a display: inline-block; to do what you want.
That said, this is a very basic problem and you might want to take a look at a css tutorial or two. If you're going to spend any amount of time working on websites, it will be worth your while.
I am currently working on a prototype that is using CSS3 multi columns for dividing up content and it appears to work well. My issue is that inside of a block that is part of the columns there is an expanding height section and well, in Firefox when the height of an element inside of a CSS3 multi-column changes it disappears and then Firefox crashes.
Shouldn't CSS3 multi-columns take into account varied height content inside or is it not made for that sort of thing? I'd really hate to have to use a plugin like Columnizer, because Columnizer is a pain in the butt to get working correctly.
Here is the layout:
[DIV]
[CONTENT] - Default height is 38 pixels
[EXPAND LINK] - A link when clicked that modifies the height of content to be 52 pixels.
[/DIV]
The issue is as soon as the link is clicked and the height changes, it's like it loses its layout and positioning (the height and width change to 0), then Firefox crashes. This is also the case if I use Firebug to change the height manually.
I resolved the issue right are posting this question basically and my solution was as follows in-case someone else runs into this issue which I believe some will.
I had a parent div element with the appropriate CSS3 multi-column code. The inner elements are article elements (you could just use div's though). The issue was that the inner article elements were being floated left (just out of pure habit of having to float things to give the appearance of columnised items). The floated elements were clashing with the CSS3 multi-column code thus crashing the browser.
I'm guessing that because a float modifies the layout of an element, the multi-column code was trying to perhaps readjust the box and then getting into an endless loop. I'm not entirely sure what went on, but floating elements inside of a multi-column div or anything is bad.