Question

Here is my css rule together with the markup:

<div style = "height:100%;">
<div style = "width:220px; margin-left: 200px;font-size:16px; height:auto;">
    <div class='navbar-inner'>
        <div class='container'>
        <ul class="nav nav-list">
            <div>   
            <li <?php if($page == 'upload_track'){ echo "class = \"active\""; }?>><a href = "#">Upload a new Track</a></li>
            <li><a href = "#">View all blog post</a></li>
            <li><a href = "#">View all tracks uploaded</a></li>
        </div>
        </ul>
    </div>
    </div>
</div>
<div style = "width:220px; margin-left: 200px;font-size:16px; height:auto;">

as of now I am making them an inline style so that it would be easy for me to change them. since switching texteditors is kind of a hassle for me.

How would I make that div take up all the available height? like the very bottom of the page. as of now it looks something like this

what I wanted to see is that the black div takes up all the available height in the page

Answer 1

Yes it can be done. Check out this example JSFiddle.

Basically I changed your HTML to this:

<div id="navbar">
    <div class='navbar-inner'>
        <div class='container'>
            <ul class="nav nav-list">
                <div>   
                    <li><a href = "#">Upload a new Track</a></li>
                    <li><a href = "#">View all blog post</a></li>
                    <li><a href = "#">View all tracks uploaded</a></li>
                </div>
            </ul>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

Essentially all I did was remove the outermost div (the one with only the style="height: 100%" on it) and gave the next div an id.

The CSS is as follows:

html, body { height: 100%; }

#navbar { 
    /* this was moved from being an inline style in the div: */
    width:220px; margin-left: 200px;font-size:16px;
    height: 100%;
}​

Basically, in order for the navbar strip to use up 100% of the height, you need to make sure that the html and body actually take up 100% of the available height. (That is, 100% on #navbar is 100% of the height of the parent element; if the parent element isn’t the height of the browser, then it doesn’t work.)
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