Re: 100% height and DIV overflow

> 1) The letter of the spec seems to be interpreted by browser-writers in
> the same way.  But the behavior exhibited by IE seems to be the way most
> non-experts interpret what should be happening.  Is the letter of the
> spec exactly what was intended?

Probably.  There is a basic principle in CSS, although one that has
been breached in some newer features, that it should be possible to 
incrementally render the document without backtracking.  That is 
highly desirable given that documents can take significant time to
load, and in some cases are generated incrementally.  (Even tables
can often be rendered incrementally, although very few designers 
seem to know about table-layout: fixed.)

> 2) If, as I fear, the answer to 1 is yes, is there any other way
> supported by the standard to achieve the creation of a complex page with

This is off topic (how to question), but position: fixed and position:
absolute, combined with bottom or right positioning the main area, and
setting overflow to auto, are what you probably want.  This may restric
your choice of browsers away from IE.

Received on Friday, 2 September 2005 22:28:17 UTC