100% CSS Layout

by johna | May 28, 2008 | HTML/CSS Web Development

I had been looking for a CSS layout that has three components - a header, footer and content area - and the following characteristics:

When the content in the content area does not fill the available window space the footer should be set to the bottom of the page.
When the content overflows the footer should be positioned at the end of the document, off the screen.
The content area should fill at least all remaining window space so that any object I put inside it can scale to 100% of its height.
The content area should have a minimum height so that it won't look silly in a very tiny window (unlikely)
If the user resizes the browser the content area should resize.

I couldn't find a pure CSS solution so I came up with a solution that uses CSS and JavaScript.

View Sample (new window)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head> <title>Untitled Page</title> <script type="text/javascript"> function maxContent(){ var divContent = getElementDimensions(document.getElementById("content")); var divHeader = getElementDimensions(document.getElementById("header")); var divFooter = getElementDimensions(document.getElementById("footer")); var remainder = document.documentElement.clientHeight - divContent.y - divFooter.height - 0 if(remainder<250){remainder=250}; //minimum height of content document.getElementById("content").style.height = remainder + "px"; function getElementDimensions(q){ var offsetY=offsetX=0; var height=q.scrollHeight; var width=q.scrollWidth; while(q){ offsetX+=q.offsetLeft; offsetY+=q.offsetTop; q=q.offsetParent; } return{ "x":offsetX,"y":offsetY,"height":height,"width":width }; } } window.onload = maxContent; window.onresize = maxContent; </script> <style type="text/css"> html,body { margin:0; padding:0; } div#container { } div#header { background-color:#fbb; } div#content { background-color:#bfb; } div#footer { background-color:#bbf; width:100%; bottom:0; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="container"> <div id="header"> Header </div> <div id="content"> <table border="1" height="100%"> <tr> <td>1</td> <td>2</td> <td>3</td> </tr> <tr> <td>b1</td> <td>b2</td> <td>b3</td> </tr> </table> </div> <div id="footer"> Footer </div> </div> </body> </html>