Question

I have a markup like this:

<div>
  <img />
</div>

The div is higher than img:

div {
  height: 100px;
}

img {
  height: dynamic-value-smaller-than-100px;
}

I need the image to be in the middle of the div (have same amout of white space above and below it).

I tried this and it does not work:

div {
  vertical-align: middle;
}

Answer 1

if your image is purely decorative, then it might be a more semantic solution to use it as a background-image. You can then specify the position of the background

background-position: center center;

If it is not decorative and constitutes valuable information then the img tag is justified. What you need to do in such case is style the containing div with the following properties:

div{
    display: table-cell; vertical-align: middle 
}

Read more about this technique here. Reported to not work on IE6/7 (works on IE8).