Re: IE 5/Mac and 100% height values

From: John Buell <dadaist@peak.org> · Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2002 17:22:04 -0600

Just out of curiosity, is this true of the MSIE 5.x installed by default
with Mac OS 9.1 and 9.2.x AND the newer 5.1 (which originally was OS X only,
but a 9.x version was released not too long ago)?

-John (whose iBook is out for repair, or he'd figure this out for himself in
a hurry :P ).

----- Original Message -----

> Some discussion and testing on the CSS-Discuss list [1] has
> raised a question about how IE 5.x on the Macintosh renders 100% heights
> under the following conditions:
>
> * The style sheet specifies 100% height for the html and body elements
> * A div is placed within the html document, whose height is also set to
> 100%
> * In order to better see the div and to understand what is happening, a
> fixed width (say, 200px) is applied, as is a background color (say,
> #cccccc)
>
> For example:
>
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
> <html>
>   <head>
>     <title>Div with 100% Height</title>
>     <style type="text/css">
>       html, body {
>         height: 100% ;
>       }
>       div {
>         height: 100% ;
>         width: 200px ;
>         background-color: #cccccc ;
>       }
>     </style>
>   </head>
>   <body>
>     <div>This should have a height of 100%</div>
>   </body>
> </html>
>
> In most browsers on which this was tested (at least IE 6/Win32,
> Mozilla 0.9.8, and Netscape 6.2.1), the div remains at a fixed height of
> 100% of the viewport (with some space for the body element's default
> margin/padding). In IE 5/5.1 for the Macintosh, on the other hand, the
> height of the div is precisely proportional (to the exact pixel) to the
> _width_ of the viewport. As the browser window is resized horizontally,
> the div's height grows or shrinks accordingly.
> I am unaware of anything in the CSS 2 spec that would dictate
> this behavior, and am tempted to think it a bug. Can anyone --
> especially someone from the IE 5/Mac team -- explain this behavior?
> Thanks.
>
> James Aylard
>
> 1. http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/css-discuss,
>
> http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/private/css-discuss/2002-February/002676
> .html
>