Force div to 100% of parent div height without spe

Question

I have a site with the following structure:

<div id="header"></div>

<div id="main">
  <div id="navigation"></div>
  <div id="content"></div>
</div>

<div id="footer"></div>

The navigation is on the left and the content div is on the right. The information for the content div is pulled in through PHP, so it's different every time.

How to scale the navigation vertically so that its height is the same as the content div's height, no matter which page is loaded?

Answer 1

I know it's been a looong time since the question was made, but I found an easy solution and thought someone could use it (sorry about the poor english). Here it goes:

CSS

.main, .sidebar {
    float: none;
    padding: 20px;
    vertical-align: top;
}
.container {
    display: table;
}
.main {
    width: 400px;
    background-color: LightSlateGrey;
    display: table-cell;
}
.sidebar {
    width: 200px;
    display: table-cell;
    background-color: Tomato;
}

HTML

<div class="container clearfix">
    <div class="sidebar">
        simple text here
    </div>
    <div class="main">
        Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam congue, tortor in mattis mattis, arcu erat pharetra orci, at vestibulum lorem ante a felis. Integer sit amet est ac elit vulputate lobortis. Vestibulum in ipsum nulla. Aenean erat elit, lacinia sit amet adipiscing quis, aliquet at erat. Vivamus massa sem, cursus vel semper non, dictum vitae mi. Donec sed bibendum ante.
    </div>
</div>

Simple example. Note that you can turn into responsiveness.

Answer 2

As shown earlier, flexbox is the easiest. eg.

#main{ display: flex; align-items:center;}

this will align all child elements to the center within the parent element.

Answer 3

[Referring to Dmity's Less code in another answer] I'm guessing that this is some kind of "pseudo-code"?

From what I understand try using the faux-columns technique that should do the trick.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/

Hope this helps :)

Answer 4

giving position: absolute; to the child worked in my case

Answer 5

NOTE: This answer is applicable to legacy browsers without support for the Flexbox standard. For a modern approach, see: https://stackoverflow.com/a/23300532/1155721

---

I suggest you take a look at Equal Height Columns with Cross-Browser CSS and No Hacks.

Basically, doing this with CSS in a browser compatible way is not trivial (but trivial with tables) so find yourself an appropriate pre-packaged solution.

Also, the answer varies on whether you want 100% height or equal height. Usually it's equal height. If it's 100% height the answer is slightly different.

Answer 6

The easiest way to do this is to just fake it. A List Apart has covered this extensively over the years, like in this article from Dan Cederholm from 2004.

Here's how I usually do it:

<div id="container" class="clearfix" style="margin:0 auto;width:950px;background:white url(SOME_REPEATING_PATTERN.png) scroll repeat-y center top;">
    <div id="navigation" style="float:left;width:190px;padding-right:10px;">
        <!-- Navigation -->
    </div>
    <div id="content" style="float:left;width:750px;">
        <!-- Content -->
    </div>
</div>

You can easily add a header onto this design by wrapping #container in another div, embedding the header div as #container's sibling, and moving the margin and width styles to the parent container. Also, the CSS should be moved into a separate file and not kept inline, etc. etc. Finally, the clearfix class can be found on positioniseverything.