[thelist] why doth i hate css? let me count the ways.

David Dorward evolt at david.us-lot.org
Fri Oct 10 02:08:44 CDT 2003


On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 09:10:52PM -0400, Joshua Olson wrote:

> You're making it way too tough.  How about the 100% of the height of the
> container, just like width?  Doesn't seem that programming the browser to
> perform this calculation should that be too tough for the infinitely gifted
> programmers that work on browser projects.  They figured it out with table
> cells many many years ago, why can't they seem to figure it out with divs?

Because the language is designed so you don't need to have downloaded
the entire element before the browser can start to render it. If it
has to do calculations based on the height of the element, it has to
download the entire element before it can calculate that height
(unless you explicitly state the height, in which case the percentile
height doesn't collapse back to 'auto').

The exception to this is elements with the display type table or
table-something. Unfortunately a certain browser can't handle this
display type (too much time being spent working on the filter
extension and the design for the Death Star I suppose) so this isn't
much use in practical terms.

-- 
David Dorward                                       http://dorward.me.uk/


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