[pmwiki-users] CSS help

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 04:30:16PM +0000, Hans wrote:
> > (The sidebar changes length depending on user authorization and whim of
> > the site owner, so min-height for the main section won't work, either.)
> 
> > Thanks for trying. Any other ideas?
> 
> It is notoriously difficult to set the height of a division, if the
> content is small. Firefox will set  a min-height, IE will ignore it.
> A solution with javascript may work for all the modern browsers, but
> is a little tricky.
> 
> All this can be enough reason to leave the pure css layout and use a
> table based layout instead, where it is not difficult at all to have
> the background stretching down.

Indeed, this is ultimately why the "pmwiki" skin uses a table-based
layout, because CSS is limited in its ability to get things to align
properly when the contents of the page are dynamic (as they are in
a wiki).

Given the current state of XTHML+CSS (and existing browser implementations 
of it), one generally has to make a compromise *somewhere*.  The 
"pmwiki" skin compromises by using a table for its layout; 
non-table-based layouts compromise by limiting the types of vertical 
alignments and spacing that are possible in the layout.

(Note that in the case of static content one can achieve almost
any desired effect in XHTML+CSS without resorting to tables, but in 
PmWiki we aren't generally dealing with static content.)

Pm