Question

I have a webpage that is horizontally centered but is rather short – it only takes up half the vertical page. I want it to be centered. How can I center the tag vertically? I cannot have a static height, so that is not an option. if CSS is not powerful enough, can I use Javascript to accomplish this? Thanks!

Answer 1

If you don’t mind adding non-semantic markup, you can do this:

html:

<div class="pusher"></div>
<div class="center"></div>

CSS:

html, body {
    height: 100%;
}
.pusher {
    height: 100%;
    margin-bottom: -50%;
}
.center {
    background: green;
    width: 400px;
    height: 200px;
    margin: 0 auto;
}

http://jsfiddle.net/Jsqqk/

---

If you do care about semantic markup, and have to support older browsers, then you’ll have to resort to JavaScript for this. Here’s one solution using jQuery:

var $window = $(window),
    $container = $('#container');

$window.resize(function(){
    $container.css('margin-top',
        Math.max(($window.height() / 2) - ($container.height() / 2), 0)
    );
}).resize();

And here’s the fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/dw3rc/