CSS Floats - content falling down in IE6 - html

I have a layout with a menu DIV on the left. This is floated left with a fixed EM width. I then have a content DIV which has a left margin of more than the menu's width. So it sits nicely to the right of the menu and fills up the remaining space with both menu and content lined up perfectly.
However, in Internet Explorer 6, if the content gets too wide it falls down below the menu. which means you have loads of whitespace and can't actually see any of the content at all without scrolling.
Unfortunately I am not able to make changes to the content - this is a redesign of a site hosting 3rd party content, and changing that content is outside the scope of what I can do.
Also, there is a footer bar that must be underneath both the menu and the content.
I managed to almost get it to work by providing IE6 with a different layout using absolute positioning - unfortunately the footer looks rubbish and as IE6 is the 2nd most used browser on our site I can't really go with that.
I also tried messing around with overflows but ended up causing problems with random scrollbars appearing all over the place which wasn't any good either.
Does anyone know if there is a simple non-Javascript way of doing this that will work in IE6 as well as "proper" browsers? I'm currently thinking that it will have to be a table based layout.
Here's an example of the problem:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
.menu {
width: 14em;
float: left;
}
.content {
margin-left: 15em;
zoom: 1;
}
.footer {
clear: both;
}
/* styling to make the demo more obvious */
.menu {
background-color: #f99;
}
.content {
background-color: #9f9;
}
.footer {
background-color: #99f;
}
td {
border: 1px solid #000;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
<div class="menu">
<ul>
<li>menu item</li>
<li>menu item</li>
<li>menu item</li>
<li>menu item</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="content">
<h1>Main Content</h1>
<table>
<tr>
<td>this is a really</td>
<td>wide table which</td>
<td>I am using to push</td>
<td>the content down</td>
<td>need to keep going</td>
<td>so that it breaks</td>
<td>in ie6</td>
<td>but naturally</td>
<td>nothing else</td>
<td>sghskdhksdhfsdhffs</td>
<td>sghskdhksdhfsdhffs</td>
<td>sghskdhksdhfsdhffs</td>
<td>sghskdhksdhfsdhffs</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
</div>
<div class="footer">
<p>Copyright blah blah blah</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>

As you mentioned you already tried position absolute. But I'll tried the following and it might work for you. Here is the CSS:
.container {
position:relative;
}
.menu {
width: 14em;
position:absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0 !important;
left: -15em;
}
.content {
margin-left: 15em;
}
.footer {
}
Some explanation: The menu is positioned absolute, independent of the other content. However, IE puts the menu relative to the "content" div, and hides it behind the "content" div. The work around is to position it negatively, just as many em's to the left as the content div has "margin-left". But this should only done for IE, so therefor the "left 0 !important" is added (but before the negative left), which works because IE ignores "!important" while the other browers do acknowledge it and will use "left 0".
Update:
As Alohci notes a better way would be to use the "* html" hack, in that case the CSS for "menu" becomes:
.menu {
width: 14em;
position:absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
}
* html .menu {
left: -15em;
}

Why not use an established layout for eg http://layouts.ironmyers.com/
or you might want to investigate this css overflow
Have a look at this, does it help?
EDIT:
Try one of these fixes:
(you could use some conditional code like #Blake suggested)
overflow:scroll -- this makes sure your content can be seen at the cost of design (scrollbars are ugly)
overflow:hidden -- just cuts off any overflow. It means people can't read the content though.
.content {
margin-left: 15em;
zoom: 1;
overflow:scroll
/* overflow:hidden */ /* probably second best */
}
Try looking at this one How to prevent long words from breaking my div? is this your problem?

Use some conditional comments for IE6 to read and place in the necessary CSS to fix the width of the problematic divs like so:
<!--[if IE 6]>
IE 6 specific stuff goes here. You can load a specific stylesheet here, or just have inline css
<![endif]-->
You can read more on the conditional comments here.

Removing the zoom: 1;
makes it work just fine for me in IE6.

Too late, but usually i get flots fixed by adding or an absolute width (a number in pixels, points or any hard measure system instead on em, % and so) or sometimes to put a min-width property solves it, also, beware of padding and borders because of the boxmodel sum.

I have run into this so many times that I just try to stay away from floats entirely. That said, there are some things you can do to make them work, but you might have to settle for a fixed with layout and/or some IE6 specific fixes. Here are some things you can try:
This may sound like heresy but
tables are not wrong for layout,
they're just not cool.
Try setting the 'container' div with
a fixed width and auto margins.
If that doesn't work, try a fixed
width 'content' div with your fixed
width 'container' div.

THanks for the position:absolute idea. This is similar to one solution I almost went with.
The problem here is that the menu will overlay the footer if the menu is longer than the content (and it quite often is). I could try to add an arbitrary height to the content to try to force a minimum height, but I won't really know how big the menu will be. There's the potential for quite a lot going down the side panel in that area.
I presume there's no way to force the relative positioned container to grow in response to the absolute positioned content, is there? Even if it's an IE6 hack, as I can use the float method for other browsers.
(Again, sorry for not posting this as a comment but I don't get that as an option)

Related

Parent div height 0, clearfix doesn't work

So i have this problem with parent element height 0px. I Know that parent element with floated children will have height 0, but nothing helps, and i don't know why. Some pictures and code samples:
<body>
<div class="article-container">
<article class="page-article">
<div class="title">...</div>
</article>
</div>
<aside>
<div>...</div>
</aside>
</body>
/*CSS*/
body,html{
padding:0;
margin:0;
text-align:center;
}
aside{
float: left;
width: 25%;
}
.article-container{
width:73%;
float:right;
padding: 0px 1%;
}
.page-article{
width: 90%;
display: inline-block;
overflow: hidden;
float:none;
}
chrome tells me this:
I used clearfix and that didn't help,
css-tricks - didn't help
Why is my div's height zero - didn't help
Also i've been adding 100% width divs at the end of the container with floated elements and that did help(a little), but after window resize everything crashed again. (chrome kept telling height: 0px; even before window resize)
I noticed that <aside> keeps the height, but the '.article-container' don't.
I don't know what to do next...
EDIT:
Maybe For some of people like me, that clearfix, adding spans, divs, setting overflow to hidden, setting float to the parent element Didn't help, I actually find another problem that may cause such a behaviour.
Check if your jquery or javascript doesn't use a parent element. In my case:
I am using masonry layout. > It works by placing elements in optimal position based on available vertical space.
I set it to two columns for some pages to display posts but also by mistake i've been using it on pages when wanted to have just one column and everthing crashed but none errors occured.
Thanks #syllabix for giving me right direction
Problem Solved

Div getting pushed to the right when using float:left on it

I'm currently creating a website and I came across a strange thing: I have a content div that's 950 width and centered on the page. Inside that I have a header div, a menu div and some other content div. I would like the menu div and that other content div to be right next to each other so I thought about using float:left on both divs. However, when I use this float:left on the menu div, it's getting pushed to the right and I can't figure out why. I think some other element is pushing it to the right.
I'm using a custom Drupal theme, a subtheme of Zen to create the page by the way.
Here's the HTML I'm using to create the page (without the header):
<div id="root">
<div class="content">
<div class="left-menu">
<ul>
<li><p>Camera</p></li>
<li><p>Audio</p></li>
<li><p>Licht</p></li>
<li><p>Lenzen</p></li>
<li><p>Grip</p></li>
<li><p>Accessoires</p></li>
<li><p>Recorders</p></li>
<li><p>Transport</p></li>
<li><p>Edit suits</p></li>
<li><p>Crew</p></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="products-overview">
This is some other content that I want to the right of the menu.
</div>
</div>
And here are some CSS properties I've set on left-menu and products-overview:
.left-menu {
margin-top: 10px;
background-color: #BBB;
width: 150px;
float: left;
}
.products-overview {
background-color: #BBB;
float: left;
}
Could anyone please explain me why the left-menu is being pushed to the right?
Hmm, I believe this is a result of the normalize.css stylesheet you're using.
The problem stems actually from the .header element, which has a table within it. The normalizing stylesheet has a margin-bottom:1.5em applied to the table, which translates into a margin on the .header element (since it has no padding/border), which in turn sends the .left-menu to the right (since the margin causes there to be no space for it to fit on the left).
Adding to your current .header table definition can fix this, with a simple:
.header table{
margin-bottom: 0;
}
I hope this is what you were looking for! If not, let me know and I'll be happy to help further. Good luck!
I tried to replicate your problem. I did and found a solution that should work. Just set the products-overview class to float:none. See this fiddle. http://jsfiddle.net/shaansingh/yj4Uc/
In Mozilla Firefox it looks ok to me. From your code, I can only see that you need a width for the content div. and watch the dimensions, especially left/right padding and borders.

Simple html/css layout? (two column)

I'm having a very hard time trying to come up with html/css for a layout to suite the following:
Where the left area is a static menu. The right area is dynamic content, generated using a call to ASP.Net's RenderBody method. You may not believe it, but I have been trying to figure this out for hours. I keep getting either the right section ending up underneath the left section taking 100% of the width or not displaying at all, with Chrome's object inspector saying its 0 pixels wide.
I feel like a complete idiot as this seems as if it should be easy as pie. Could I please get some help?
There's several ways to go about this. Here's one not particularly fancy but straight-up way to go about it:
<body>
<div id="menu">MENU</div>
<div id="content"> content <br /> content <br /> content </div>
</body>
CSS:
div { border: 2px solid black; } /* demo purposes */
#menu {
float: left;
width: 150px;
}
#content {
margin-left: 154px; /* menu width + (2 x menu.border-width) */
}
See this jsfiddle for a working sample.
This solution has the added benefit that your content region will take up exactly 100% of the remaining width of its parent:
<div class="parent">
<div class="content">blah...</div>
<div class="left-menu">blah...</div>
</div>
CSS:
.parent { padding-left:200px;width:100%; }
.content { position:relative;float:left;width:100%; }
.left-menu { position:relative;float:left;width:200px;right:200px;margin-left:-100%; }
Excellent tutorial on fluid layouts: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail
Works in IE7 and newer, Safari/Chrome/Opera/Firefox...
The best way to do this is by using the already considered safe to use box-sizing property.
Take a look at the tinkerbin -> http://tinkerbin.com/AcJjYk0r
It works as you want it to. Fixed width for the menu, percentage based width for the content area.
Then...
...if you want the background-colors to expand to the highest of the heights between the two boxes (remember, one times the menu can be higher than the content box, and vice-versa), then the only way to go about it (no javascript) is to use a background image and place it below the two boxes. With css3 gradients (safe to use too) it's pretty easy. Take a look:
http://tinkerbin.com/3ETH28Oq

Cannot make 3 column layout work within list for IE7

I am trying to create a liquid 3 column area within a list item. To achieve this, I use the standard method of having 3 elements, of which the first two are the sides, floated left and right, and the 3rd is the content, which should sit between the two. The following HTML works fine in Firefox, but doesn't render correctly in IE7 - the content is rendered below the two floated elements. Any ideas what the problem is?
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<style>
*
{
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0;
}
span
{
display:block;
}
.corner
{
width: 12px;
height: 12px;
}
.tl
{
float: left;
}
.tr
{
float: right;
}
.fill
{
margin: 0px 12px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<ul>
<li>
<span class="tl corner">a</span>
<span class="tr corner">b</span>
<span class="fill">text text text</span>
</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
Note that replacing the spans with divs results in the same effect. I've also tried various DocTypes with no luck. And it works fine outside of the list, hence the problem appears to be intrinsic to using the list.
The way IE sees it, you're trying to jam in the lines one after the other, but the first two have already taken up their space, FLOATing away, which leaves the last SPAN in the LI to fight for the next level, which in IE looks like the next level below.
Since the last SPAN is not floated, that's also why it gets knocked to the next level.
Also, SPANs are inline styles, not block level elements. You should replace SPAN with DIV is you still want to try and style this in a LI element.
You should also use a full DOCTYPE so the browsers will know how to render the page. Otherwise they will default to quirks mode, ugly and all over the place.
But the better tactic is to create this float of 3 columns outside of the LI and in a DIV setting.
Have a read of CSSplay or Max Design on creating 3 column layouts.
It's a bit difficult to say anything without seeing the markup, but why don't you just put the two elements which should float inside the content element? You would have to adjust with some padding on the content element, but that should do the job. Then again, not quite sure what you mean. If you supply us with a bit more markup, it would be easier to tell.
The center block should have margins to either side allowing room for the floated blocks.
The answer is to wrap the spans in a block level element (say, a div), with overflow set to hidden. Example came from a more in depth look at the 2nd CSSplay example.

Footer background should extend to bottom of browser

I have a problem with fixing the footer to the bottom of the browser .. The problem is when resolution changes or windows resizes the footer content overlaps the content of the website, here is the current css for footer div
div.footer {
position:absolute;
bottom:0px;
}
Does anybody knows how can I fix this? Thank you
UPDATE:
This is what I need exactly but for some reason it doesn't work for my web page, it does work when I cut paste code to the blank page, but since my page is full with content and everything, what are the important elements to include? Hereis the url.
The above trick works only if my website has filled content if I have some lets say few lines the above trick doesn't work.
UPDATE II
My website has dynamic content so I think can't use this sort of CSS Sticky footers because sometimes the website will just have few lines sometimes be packed with content. Thats why the footer is not sticking to the bottom of the webpage.. its not problem to stick the footer if there is plenty content on the website the problem is without.
What you have here is a common problem for which there is no common answer, but what I would try if I were you since all these above suggestions apparently aren't working, I'd try to set my page container background to any color let say white (#FFFFFF) and I'd set background color of body to any other then white let say grey (#CCCCCC). And finaly set footer position to relative and of course it must be placed after everything if you want it alway to be at the bottom. This way you'll get what you need 100 % sure if you follow step by step instructions.
Checkout CSS Sticky Footer for an excellent cross-browser compatible method.
What that site essentially does is make the footer stick BENEATH the browser edge, and gives it a negative margin that has the same value as the footer's height. This way, the footer is sure to stick to the bottom.
You can add a push div to the last element before the footer in order to always assure that the footer doesn't overlap the content.
Given this example:
<html>
<body>
<div class="header" />
<div class="content" />
<div class="footer_push" />
<div class="footer" />
</body>
</html>
If <div class="footer" /> is always 75px high, use the following CSS:
html, body { height: 100%; } /* Take all available vertical space */
/* Push the bottom of the page 75px.
This will not make scrollbars appear
if the content fits already. */
.footer_push { height: 75px; }
/* Position the footer */
.footer { position: absolute; bottom: 0; height: 75px; }
Basically you need to give the footer a fixed height and to push the footer with another div of the same height to the bottom. There's however more browser specific stuff which you need to take into account:
The html and body must besides having a height of 100% no (default) margin to avoid the footer being pushed further to below that amount of margin.
The p and div elements throughout the page must have no margin-top to avoid the footer being pushed further to below that amount of top-margins in under each Firefox.
The "container" div must use min-height of 100% instead of height to avoid the footer to overlap the remaining of the content. IE6 which doesn't know min-height just works fine with height, so you'll need to add a * html hack for this.
All with all, here's an SSCCE, just copy'n'paste'n'run it:
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7">
<title>SO question 1900813</title>
<style>
html, body {
margin: 0;
height: 100%;
}
p, div {
margin-top: 0; /* Fix margin collapsing behaviour in FF. Use padding-top if necessary. */
}
#container {
position: relative;
min-height: 100%;
}
* html #container {
height: 100%; /* This is actually "min-height" for IE6 and older. */
}
#pushfooter {
height: 50px; /* Must be the same as footer height. */
}
#footer {
position: absolute;
bottom: 0;
height: 50px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="container">
<p>Some content</p>
<div id="pushfooter"></div>
<div id="footer">Footer</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Edit: after more testing I realized that this indeed does not work in IE8 (I still consider it as a beta so I didn't really use/test it, sorry about that), unless you let it render in IE7 compatibility modus (insert sad smilie here) by adding the following meta tag to the <head> (which I already added to the SSCCE here above):
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7">
or to let it render in quirks mode by using a "wrong" doctype (either remove the <!doctype> or pick one of the doctypes associated with painfully red Q boxes in IE here). But I wouldn't do that, that has more negative side-effects as well.
And, surprisingly, the http://www.cssstickyfooter.com site as someone else here mentioned here which used an entirely different approach also did not work in IE8 here (try to resize browser window in y-axis, the footer won't move along it as opposed to other browsers, including IE6/7). That browser keeps astonishing me. Really.
Try setting the footers Position to relative and playing around with a negative top margin to get it how you want it.
What you're looking for is a Sticky Footer, you can find a lot of resources like this one: http://ryanfait.com/resources/footer-stick-to-bottom-of-page/
try this:
#wpr{
display: table;
height: 100%;
width: 100%;
}
.dsp-tr{
display: table-row;
}
.dsp-tc{
display: table-cell;
}
#ftr-cnr{
text-align: center;
vertical-align: middle;
}
#ftr{
background-color: red;
padding: 10px 0px;
font-size: 24px;
}
<div id="wpr">
<div class="dsp-tr">
<div class="dsp-tc">
body
</div>
</div>
<div class="dsp-tr">
<div class="dsp-tc" id="ftr-cnr">
<div id="ftr">
footer
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
display: table does not make it a table, a <div> is still a <div>, it just tells the browser to display it as table.
i tested it in chrome and firefox
let me know if it works for you.
We had this problem a few times. We could not find any cross browser CSS only solution. We finally resorted to JQuery. We wrote our own (i can't publish) but this one http://www.hardcode.nl/archives_139/article_244-jquery-sticky-footer.htm looks promising:
$(function(){
positionFooter();
function positionFooter(){
if($(document.body).height() < $(window).height()){
$("#pageFooterOuter").css({position: "absolute",top:($(window).scrollTop()+$(window).height()-$("#pageFooterOuter").height())+"px"})
}
}
$(window)
.scroll(positionFooter)
.resize(positionFooter)
});
Do you have a DOCTYPE declaration in the top of your HTML?
If so, there is a good chance I have a solution for you.
I was trying to do a height:100% table or div (assuming this is a basic cornerstone to the expanding footer feature)
No matter what I did, the 100% height didn't work! the elements just didn't stretch...
I narrowed it down to a very basic HTML
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Test1</title>
</head>
<body>
<div style="border: 2px solid red; height: 100%">Hello
World</div>
</body>
</html>
but the DIV didn't stretch all the way down (the 100% was ignored). This was true also for tables with plain height="100%" attribute.
As a desperate last result guess, I removed the DOCTYPE row, resulting in this code
<html>
<head>
<title>Test1</title>
</head>
<body>
<div style="border: 2px solid red; height: 100%">Hello
World</div>
</body>
</html>
And it worked!
I'm sure there is a good explanation, but I really didn't care since it solved the problem
Update
See related question (asked by me)
Depends on what you want to do. I you want it to be always visible on the bottom of your screen, you should use
div.footer{
position: fixed;
bottom: 0;
}
Be sure to get some padding on the bottom of your body (or container, so that people can actually scroll to the bottom of the text). The main problem here is that when resizing everything it will overlap.
If you just want to have a footer that has a background-image / colour that stretches all the way till the end (for pages that are not fullpage height) you could try to use a faux column principle or even try to give your body the background colour of your footer and fix the header / content background.
Today I stumbled across this page:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~peterned/examples/csslayout1.html
Could be helpfull
I came up with a fairly simple solution that doesn't use any CSS height hacks or any of that.
You just set your <body> with the background you want the footer to have, and then put everything besides the footer in a <div> with the properties you would normally give to the body tag.
This gets the footer to "extend" its color to the bottom of the page when there is short dynamic content without expanding it needlessly when there is a lot of dynamic content. The "virtual body" div can still have a gradient followed by a solid color, and the footer's background is hiding in the body tag, only showing up on short pages. (Works great if you need a solid color to continue after your footer gradient ends, or if you just need the background to match the footer color)
CSS
body {background-color: #000; }
#primary_container { background: #FFF url('/images/bgvert.png'); background-repeat: repeat-x; }
#footer { background: #000; }
HTML
<body>
<div id="primary_container">
<!-- most content, can be short or long -->
</div>
<div id="footer">
<!-- if primary content + footer is less than browser height, body background color
displays below this. If it is more, you get normal scroll behavior to the end
of footer and body background color is never seen -->
</div>
</body>