Making HTML content expand to fill the window

Question

I have an HTML page divided vertically into

• Header
• Body
• Footer

The body in turn is divided horizontally into

• A large DIV on the left surrounded by scrollbars, displaying a portion of a diagram
• A form on the right

The header and footer are fixed-height. The body should expand vertically to fill the portion of the window not occupied by the header and footer.

Similarly the form is fixed-width and the scroll pane should expand horizontally to fill the window width.

The diagram is very large (up to 10x10 screenfuls) so I cannot display all of it. Instead I want to display as much as possible (using the whole window) so that the user needs to scroll as little as possible.

I also cannot use javascript, because some users are necessarily paranoid and must disable it.

Some options I have considered:

• A table with the scroll pane cell's width and height set to 100% and all others to 1%
  Doesn't work. The table (and hence the page) expands to contain the entire diagram, even with absolute positioning on the scroll pane DIV.
• Absolute positioning to offset the pane from the bottom of the page by the height of the footer
  Works but inaccurate: the footer's height depends on the current font size and whether text is wrapped. This means I must leave a large margin to ensure they do not overlap.
• Place the diagram in an IFRAME
  The best solution I've found with scripts disabled, but limits what I can do in scripts when they are enabled.

I notice that Google Maps uses a fixed-size area for the map when scripts are disabled. If Google has given up on this problem does that mean it's not feasible?

Answer 1

Using the height: 100% CSS attribute should make it work.

See if Dave Woods 100% Height Layout Using CSS works for you.