I’ve coded myself into a corner or I am overseeing something obvious here. I have a semi-fluid CSS layout that is designed like this:
header – 100% width at all times, contains a x-repeated background image
container – fluid (960px to 1200px, centered, contains two columns)
footer – 100% width at all times, contains a x-repeated background image
In almost all cases this works fine.
In summary, the design as a whole scales to any width, yet the content part only to 1200px at a maximum. However, since this concerns a photo site, sometimes images are wider than the container width of 1200px and the image breaks out of it. This is perfectly fine, I want the full image to be shown. However, I want the header and footer to scale to the widest element, in this case the image. This is not happening and is particularly troublesome when I resize the window to a width less than the image and then scroll to the right using the horizontal scrollbar: it leaves a clear gap on both the header and footer whilst I want them to stretch to at least the image/content width.
Simply setting the width to 100% is not enough as that concerns the viewport, not the content width. I can forcefully use min-width with a large value for the header and footer, but that leaves a horizontal scrollbar in normal resolutions. I could hide that scrollbar using overflow:hidden but that would chop of content and not display a scrollbar when the window is small.
To make a long story short, I guess what I want is that this layout would work as a table would work: if one column’s content is wider than its size, it pushes all other rows to that same width. The largest width determines the total width. I prefer a solution without javascript, but am thinking it is either not possible or I am overseeing something very obvious?
100% width sets the element’s width to 100% of the width of the element it is contained in. In your case, it seems this is the window itself (or the body element). To make the header and footer divs (I’m assuming you’re using divs here) scale with the image, they will probably need to either be included in the same div that the image is in, or inside a div that the image div is also in, assuming that div is scaling to the correct width (don’t assume it is scaling to fit the image).
However, in many cases using a table for your layout can be much cleaner, and will handle the type of horizontal scaling you’re looking for without needing to resort to css hacks.