Question

I’m building a fixed width website (using the classic wrapper with margin:auto), but I want the sidebar background to extend to the right end of the screen.

So far I’ve accomplished this:

HTML

<div id="wrapper">
    <div id="left">Content area</div>
        <div id="right">
            <div id="actual-sidebar">
                Sidebar
            <span class="clearme"></span>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

CSS

body {
    background: #333;
    color: #fff;
    overflow-x: hidden;
}

#wrapper {
    width: 500px;
    height: 1200px;
    margin: auto;
    border: 2px dashed #fff;
}

#left {
    width: 300px;
    height: 500px;
    float: left;
}

#right {
    width: 175px;
    height: 500px;
    margin-left: 325px;
    margin-right: -9999px;
    padding-right: 9999px;
    background: #777;
}

#actual-sidebar {
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
    border: 2px dotted #f0f;
}

​
You can see it in action here:
http://jsfiddle.net/knjDV/
http://www.spazionegativo.it/layout-test/

Is this kind of “full-width sidebar” possible using css only?

In the example above, the actual sidebar width is highlighted by the pink border, and the rest is all padding and negative margin; worked in chrome but IE broke it so I’ve added overflow-x: hidden to fix it.

The problem is, click-dragging to the right will scroll the view even if there’s nothing to select, eventually hiding the content. I can’t seem to get past this problem.

Is there a fix to the “drag-n-scroll” issue, or an entirely different way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

If you add to #right{ position: fixed;} that will get rid of the horizontal scrollbar. Is that acceptable?