Is it possible to make the wrapper fill the window height (no scrolling) and the center div scrollable without messing around with pixels and javascript?
<div id="wrapper">
<h1>Header</h1>
<div id="center">
<div style="height:1000px">high content</div>
</div>
<div id="footer">Footer</div>
</div>
Basically I want the header to be visible at the top and the footer to be always visible at the bottom and have a scrollable content in the center which occupies the remaning height.
The header, footer and center divs' heights are all unknown (no set px or %, i.e. variable font-size or padding). Is it possible with pure CSS?
2014 UPDATE: The modern way to solve this layout problem is to use the flexbox
CSS model. It's supported by all major browsers and IE11+.
2012: The correct way to do this with CSS alone is to use display: table
and display: table-row
. These are supported by all major browsers, starting with IE8. This is not using tables for display. You'll use divs:
html, body {
height: 100%;
margin: 0;
}
.wrapper {
display: table;
height: 100%;
width: 100%;
background: yellow; /* just to make sure nothing bleeds */
}
.header {
display: table-row;
background: gray;
}
.content {
display: table-row; /* height is dynamic, and will expand... */
height: 100%; /* ...as content is added (won't scroll) */
background: turquoise;
}
.footer {
display: table-row;
background: lightgray;
}
<div class="wrapper">
<div class="header">
<h1>Header</h1>
<p>Header of variable height</p>
</div>
<div class="content">
<h2>Content that expands in height dynamically to adjust for new content</h2>
Content height will initially be the remaining
height in its container (<code>.wrapper</code>).
<!-- p style="font-size: 4000%">Tall content</p -->
</div>
<div class="footer">
<h3>Sticky footer</h3>
<p>Footer of variable height</p>
</div>
</div>
That's it. The divs are wrapped as you'd expect.