Make a div fill the height of the remaining screen

Question

I am currently working on a web application, where I want the content to fill the height of the entire screen.

The page has a header, which contains a logo, and account information. This could be an arbitrary height. I want the content div to fill the rest of the page to the bottom.

I have a header div and a content div. At the moment I am using a table for the layout like so:

CSS and HTML

#page {
    height: 100%; width: 100%
}

#tdcontent {
    height: 100%;
}

#content {
    overflow: auto; /* or overflow: hidden; */
}

<table id="page">
    <tr>
        <td id="tdheader">
            <div id="header">...</div>
        </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td id="tdcontent">
            <div id="content">...</div>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

The entire height of the page is filled, and no scrolling is required.

For anything inside the content div, setting top: 0; will put it right underneath the header. Sometimes the content will be a real table, with it's height set to 100%. Putting header inside content will not allow this to work.

Is there a way to achieve the same effect without using the table?

Update:

Elements inside the content div will have heights set to percentages as well. So something at 100% inside the div will fill it to the bottom. As will two elements at 50%.

Update 2:

For instance, if the header takes up 20% of the screen's height, a table specified at 50% inside #content would take up 40% of the screen space. So far, wrapping the entire thing in a table is the only thing that works.

Answer 1

You can actually use display: table to split the area into two elements (header and content), where the header can vary in height and the content fills the remaining space. This works with the whole page, as well as when the area is simply the content of another element positioned with position set to relative, absolute or fixed. It will work as long as the parent element has a non-zero height.

See this fiddle and also the code below:

CSS:

body, html {
    height: 100%;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}

p {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}

.additional-padding {
    height: 50px;
    background-color: #DE9;
}

.as-table {
    display: table;
    height: 100%;
    width: 100%;
}

.as-table-row {
    display: table-row;
    height: 100%;
}

#content {
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
    background-color: #33DD44;
}

HTML:

<div class="as-table">
    <div id="header">
        <p>This header can vary in height, it also doesn't have to be displayed as table-row. It will simply take the necessary space and the rest below will be taken by the second div which is displayed as table-row. Now adding some copy to artificially expand the header.</p>
        <div class="additional-padding"></div>
    </div>
    <div class="as-table-row">
        <div id="content">
            <p>This is the actual content that takes the rest of the available space.</p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

Answer 2

CSS3 Simple Way

height: calc(100% - 10px); // 10px is height of your first div...

all major browsers these days support it, so go ahead if you don't have requirement to support vintage browsers.

Answer 3

If you can deal with not supporting old browsers (that is, MSIE 9 or older), you can do this with Flexible Box Layout Module which is already W3C CR. That module allows other nice tricks, too, such as re-ordering content.

Unfortunately, MSIE 9 or lesser do not support this and you have to use vendor prefix for the CSS property for every browser other than Firefox. Hopefully other vendors drop the prefix soon, too.

An another choice would be CSS Grid Layout but that has even less support from stable versions of browsers. In practice, only MSIE 10 supports this.

Answer 4

I found a quite simple solution, because for me it was just a design issue. I wanted the rest of the Page not to be white below the red footer. So i set the pages background color to red. And the contents backgroundcolor to white. With the contents height set to eg. 20em or 50% an almost empty page won't leave the whole page red.

Answer 5

It could be done purely by CSS using vh:

#page 
{
  display:block; width:100%; height:95vh !important; overflow:hidden;
}
#tdcontent 
{
  float:left; width:100%; display:block;
}
#content 
{      
float:left; width:100%; height:100%; display:block; overflow:scroll;
}

and the HTML

<div id="page">
   <div id="tdcontent">
   </div>
   <div id="content">
   </div>
</div>

I checked it, It works in all major browsers: Chrome, IE, and FireFox

Answer 6

Spinning off the idea of Mr. Alien...

This seems a cleaner solution than the popular flex box one for CSS3 enabled browsers.

Simply use min-height(instead of height) with calc() to the content block.

The calc() starts with 100% and subtracts heights of headers and footers (need to include padding values)

Using "min-height" instead of "height" is particularly useful so it can work with javascript rendered content and JS frameworks like Angular2. Otherwise, the calculation will not push the footer to the bottom of the page once the javascript rendered content is visible.

Here is a simple example of a header and footer using 50px height and 20px padding for both.

Html:

<body>
    <header></header>
    <div class="content"></div>
    <footer></footer>
</body>

Css:

.content {
    min-height: calc(100% - (50px + 20px + 20px + 50px + 20px + 20px));
}

Of course, the math can be simplified but you get the idea...