Topic: The interpretation of height: 100%

Now, I know IE interprets this the way I'm looking for, by making the element's height 100% fo its containing element, but do I have it wrong and this is not, in fact, the way it's supposed to be interpreted? When I set the height of a div to 100% in firefox it only shows as much of my DIV as there is content. Is this the way it's supposed to be? If so, any idea how I'd make said DIV cover the page and not just as much of it as has content?

A link or image would help you know.

Here lie the remains of Templar654's sig... *sniff*
Cell #23041 | View File

If you're in quirks mode and setting a table's height attribute to 100% there's no problem.

If you're in an xhtml doctype and setting a div to 100%, well, tough, it won't behave the way you (and I for that matter) think it ought to.

There are fakes and hacks here and there, depending on what you're trying to do.

For mozilla/firefox, you need to set the HTML and the BODY height to 100% if you want anything contained within them to be 100%.


Unfortunately, it still doesn't work right if the content exceeds the window height...

templar654: I'm not looking for people ot fix my code for me. if I were, I now have webspace so I would have put it online and asked for help on that. All I want to know is how the various browsers interpret height: 100% and am explaining how I came ot be askiung such a question.

JK and DL: Thanks much for your help guys. Looks like my stylesheet is going to include a few fo the godo ol' IE '* html body' element references then in various places. And yes, my doctype was set to XHTML 1.0 Strict...so I think I'll give it a try in quirks mode and simply live with the hacks in my stylesheet.

Thanks again everyone.

edit: My apologies Templar...I totally forogt what I posted last night, and I did in fact ask for help in one area. I iwll post up a link to my code at some point, but I want to try a few things and see if I can get it working on my own first.

(Edited by Skaarjj on 09-20-2004 09:17)

dl's exactly correct there but I wanted to mention before you got too far off on a weird tangent, that you can fake a 100% column by using a background-image for the body that tiles all the way down if that's what you're trying to do. Otherwise you'll be limited to 100% of the broswer's initial "live area".

This is why an example of what you're trying to do would be good, if you're working in the body this is a fairly easy solution, some other element would have to use some other trick, without an example you might be going off learning yourself some bad habits (or completely innovating, heck, someone's gotta do it).