- From: Peter Foti (PeterF) <PeterF@SystolicNetworks.com>
- Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 13:09:04 -0400
- To: "'Chris Casciano'" <10sball@placenamehere.com>
- Cc: "'www-style@w3.org'" <www-style@w3.org>
> Peter, i understand your frustration, so let me try and > clarify what is > taking place here. What we have is a clash between the ones > mental model of > the page and the actual model of the document. > > With small document (one that doesn't fill up the browser > window) set a > border of a few pixels on the body. This should show what > you're dealing > with. The *body* is as wide as the window, but only as tall > as it needs to > be. If that was the case, then if I was to apply a style to the body element, and give it a background color, then I would only see the background color on some of the page (for small documents), correct? But this is not the case. Instead, the background color is applied to the entire viewport. The body takes up the entire viewport (by default). > This is often times shorter then the height of the browser window > itself. The minimum height of the document is not the browser > height. It's > because of this that centering a box (div) inside of the > containing box > (body) would not center it in the "box" that is the browser opening. > Therefore, in reality, CSS doesn't know about the height *or* > the width of > the browser, it just happens that the width of the document > IS the width of > the browser. > > Now, i'll withhold any comments on whether I think this is the right > approach, I will just say that I've seen *a lot* of folks not > expecting it > to work this way (or wanting it to work differently). > > -- > name://chris aka://10sball http://placenamehere.com > >
Received on Wednesday, 24 October 2001 13:10:23 UTC