Why certain DOCTYPE declarations cause 100%-height tables and divs to stop working?
It seems to me that some DOCTYPE declarations in IE (6-8) may cause the browser to ignore height="100%" on tables and divs (style="height:100%")
E.g
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Test1</title>
</head>
<body>
<div style="border: 2px solid red; height: 100%">
Hello World
</div>
</body>
</html>
Will render the DIV with the height of the text, it will not stretch. Removing the DOCTYPE declaration causes the DIV to stretch vertically as desired.
So my questions are:
- Why does it happen?
- How do you keep the
DOCTYPEand still allow tables to stretch? - Does / did it happen to you?
- Did you know about it?, is it well known?
Answer
Because ancient browsers had odd, inconsistent behavior and browsers treat Doctypes like an intelligence test to see if the author is writing code to the standards or to what they learned from W3Schools a decade ago. If you have
height: 100%and the height of the parent element isautothen100%meansauto.Generally, you don't. It screams "layout table". That said, set heights or minimum heights on the html and body elements. There are other techniques, but I don't have a handy link at the moment as, oddly, I've never been in a position where I needed the technique.
It is what browsers are supposed to do, so …
Well, I am answering this question …