Comments on: CSS Absolute Positioning

By: Kyle

Kyle — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:52:58 +0000

Fred, I would only recommend using absolute positioning for elements of your site design that are fixed in size (header images, menus, navigation, etc.). If you’re applying an absolute position to an element that has dynamic content, your best bet is probably to use jQuery or other client script to position and resize your content.

By: fred

fred — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:34:47 +0000

Hi there,

you said “The easiest way to avoid this is to set the parent element’s height to a fixed value” and then you set a height of 3em to the container div, which actually seems to be a very easy way but real world often isn’t that simple. Do you know how to expand the container div height dynamically?

Thanks,
Fred

By: cris

cris — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 08:58:50 +0000

Interesting stuff, I’ve read several posts and it has cleared up alot of confusion about CSS.

Ty, cris

By: Kyle

Kyle — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:17:44 +0000

Hi, Ron. Yes! You can do that with a little CSS trick where you position the element to 50% left, and then you take away half of that element’s width in order to center it (via a negative left margin). It goes something like this:

.centeredElement { width: 400px; position: absolute; top: 50px; left: 50%; margin-left: -200px; }

As you can see, the “centeredElement” has a width of 400 pixels, and then we used the left margin to move the element 200 pixels to the left, thus centering the absolutely positioned element at 50% of it’s parent.

By: ron

ron — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:04:02 +0000

Hey, thanks for the great article. Is there anyway easy way to center the tags while using the absolute value? 50% left or right starts from the edge of the item so it is not accurate if people are viewing at different sizes.

Thanks.