Question

I know this is a sort of a common problem, and I looked up some solutions, but couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for.

I would like to convert this to a tableless layout.

Note: header and footer have to be set to a fixed height in pixels (50px is ok).

The main problem I’m having is that I cannot get that “big box” in the middle to behave like it does when it’s done with tables. There are solutions which work OK for a variable length content (text, images), but I would like this box look and behave like a box – with borders, rounded corners and all.

Answer 1

You can do it with table style CSS properties, but still retain table less markup (which is still a win).

Example

HTML

<div id="container">
    <div id="header"><div>header</div></div>
    <div id="content"><div>content</div></div>
    <div id="footer"><div>footer</div></div>
</div>

CSS

html,
body {
    height: 100%; 
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0;
}

#container {
    display: table; 
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
    border: 1px solid red;   
    text-align: center;
}

#container > div {   
    display: table-row;   
    width: 100%;
}

#container > div > div {   
    display: table-cell;   
    width: 100%;
    border-radius:10px; 

}

#header > div {
    height:50px; 
    border:solid 2px #aaa;
}

#content > div {
    height: 100%;    
    background:#f0f4f0; 
    border:solid 2px #5a5;
}

#footer > div {
    height:50px; 
    border:solid 2px #a55;
}

jsFiddle.