Question

When appending divs to a div with a fixed height, the child divs will appear from top to bottom, sticking at the top border.

┌─────────────────────────┐
│ Child Div 1             │
│ Child Div 2             │
│                         │
│                         │
│                         │
└─────────────────────────┘

I’m now trying to display them from bottom to top like this (sticking to the bottom border):

┌─────────────────────────┐
│                         │
│                         │
│                         │
│ Child Div 1             │
│ Child Div 2             │
└─────────────────────────┘
┌─────────────────────────┐
│                         │
│                         │
│ Child Div 1             │
│ Child Div 2             │
│ Child Div 3             │
└─────────────────────────┘
┌───────────────────────┬─┐
│ Child Div 2           │▲│
│ Child Div 3           │ │
│ Child Div 4           │ │
│ Child Div 5           │█│
│ Child Div 6           │▼│
└───────────────────────┴─┘

And so on… I hope you get what I mean.

Is this simply doable with CSS (something like vertical-align: bottom)? Or do I have to hack something together with JavaScript?

Answer 1

All the answers miss the scrollbar point of your question. And it’s a tough one. If you only need this to work for modern browsers and IE 8+ you can use table positioning, vertical-align:bottom and max-height. See MDN for specific browser compatibility.

Demo (vertical-align)

.wrapper {
  display: table-cell;
  vertical-align: bottom;
  height: 200px;
}
.content {
  max-height: 200px;
  overflow: auto;
}

html

<div class="wrapper">
  <div class="content">
     <div>row 1</div>
     <div>row 2</div>
     <div>row 3</div>  
  </div>
</div>  

---

Other than that, I think it’s not possible with CSS only. You can make elements stick to the bottom of their container with position:absolute, but it’ll take them out of the flow. As a result they won’t stretch and make the container to be scrollable.

Demo (position-absolute)

.wrapper {
  position: relative;
  height: 200px;
}
.content {
  position: absolute;
  bottom: 0;
  width: 100%;
}