How (and why) to use display: table-cell (CSS)

Question

I have a site with a very active background (I'm talking 6 or so different z-indexes here 2 with animations). I wanted a in the foreground that had content but wanted a "window" through to the background in it. Some problems I had:

1. you can't "punch a hole" in a background, so...

   • I built a containing div, lets call it "srminfo"
   • Inside that I had a "top", "left", "window", "right" and "bottom"
   • the top, left, right, bottom all had opaque white backgrounds
   • while the srminfo and window divs had background:none;

2. No matter how hard I tried, the "right" div wouldn't fill the space between the "top" and "bottom" divs, I tried a lot of different things. The reason it had to be dynamic is that the text in the "left" div was dynamic based on the background colour, which was itself generated randomly with JavaScript.

How is display: table; and all the other related CSS code like tables? And how can it be used?

Answer 1

After days trying to find the answer, I finally found

display: table;

There was surprisingly very little information available online about how to actually getting it to work, even here, so on to the "How":

To use this fantastic piece of code, you need to think back to when tables were the only real way to structure HTML, namely the syntax. To get a table with 2 rows and 3 columns, you'd have to do the following:

<table>
    <tr>
        <td></td>
        <td></td>
        <td></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td></td>
        <td></td>
        <td></td>
    </tr>
</table>

Similarly to get CSS to do it, you'd use the following:

HTML

<div id="table">
    <div class="tr">
        <div class="td"></div>
        <div class="td"></div>
        <div class="td"></div>
    </div>
    <div class="tr">
        <div class="td"></div>
        <div class="td"></div>
        <div class="td"></div>
    </div>
</div>

CSS

#table{ 
    display: table; 
}
.tr{ 
    display: table-row; 
}
.td{ 
    display: table-cell; }

As you can see in the JSFiddle example below, the divs in the 3rd column have no content, yet are respecting the auto height set by the text in the first 2 columns. WIN!

http://jsfiddle.net/blyzz/1djs97yv/1/

It's worth noting that display: table; does not work in IE6 or 7 (thanks, FelipeAls), so depending on your needs with regards to browser compatibility, this may not be the answer that you are seeking.