CSS - position: absolute; - auto height

Question

I am having a problem with some div's

The outer div has a min-height, but the inner divs are all varying heights. Because the inner divs are absolute positioned, they do not affect the outer divs height. Is there a way to make these inner divs affect the height of the outer div?

The reason I am styling these divs with position:absolute is so that they all start at the top of the container div.

Answer 1

As far as I know, there's no way for absolutely positioned child elements to affect the height of their statically, or relatively positioned parent elements using only CSS. Either:

• Reorganize so that the child elements remain in the document flow
• Use JavaScript on load of the page to set the height of the parent to the height of the largest child

This issue is common in fade-in/fade-out JavaScript slideshows, and from what I've seen either 1) the height of the parent container needs to be defined or 2) the parent container's height is set dynamically for each slide.

Answer 2

I recently had this problem with a fade in/out CSS transition slideshow, and ended up solving it by giving the first child element position: relative; and the others position: absolute; top:0; left: 0; which ensures that the containers height is the same as the height of first element. Since my CSS transition slideshow uses the opacity property the container dimensions never changes during the course of the slideshow.

Alas, since I also needed to supply a javascript fallback for older browsers I had to set the container height for these browsers anyway (because of jQuerys fadeIn/fadeOut actually setting display: none; I would guess).