Problem with backgrounds, aligning bottom too short for long pages!

Kosmo

Very annoying problem, and I think that it is mainly due to the new rule of html being the very bottom layer.

When you put a background on your page and want it to aligh to the bottom of the page, the bottom rule in background means the bottom of the window, not the bottom of the page.

My rules for the background are as follows.

html { height: 100%; background: rgb(46, 77, 154) url(images/niitty.jpg) repeat-x center bottom; margin: 0; padding: 0; }

where this works like a charm in pages that don't stretch over the window, it's pure hell for the pages that do continue over it, when scrolling down the background stops at the bottom of the browser window, creating nasties.

Not cool!

Bergamot

I've never fround a satisfactory cross-browser solution that works both when the content is smaller than the browser and when it is larger.

Kosmo

Problem cumulates to furious explosion when the layout is liquid. I wish they would offer a better and more complex solution for us who KNOW how to program than CSS and HTML, offer us a small but nimble scripting language instead of a markup language. That would solve problems like this, if something is out of reach, we could code the problem away. Javascript does something like this, but I'm not ready to take the plunge, the page is a single clean html file and I would like to keep it that way, so that my mates here at the office can fix it if problems occur.

Bergamot

I wish that simple tasks like float clearing and background stretching and text hiding didn't require voodoo rituals.

Kosmo

Agreed. For the time being, I just fixed the sucker, that ought to take the problem away for now. It's like cancer, only people suffering from it seems to be the ones that are constantly working with it, but the general populace knows about the problem but they don't care enough to fix it.

lech

Best way to combat this situation would be nested divs positioned absolutely at the bottom area of your page. But yeah, you're going to encounter tons of nastiness if not only in html code, but the CSS itself causing problems. Once the canvas rendering is all sorted out and the w3c get off their asses and start defining absolutes along with examples of both code and a snapshot of the expected results, don't expect much work in browser development getting done. As for rendering with an actual programming syntax, you've obviously forgotten about the methods IE used to make DX calls for filters and other unwanted crap. While some of the effects it offered were semi-nice in theory, the browser as a whole was and still is rather trash. Why must they continue a legacy of bad rendering? WHY?

Kosmo

As the millenium old truth, I'm evil. And as I'm evil, I would just trash the current browsers with their hacks and update the standards to a certain level from where updating them would be much easier and I'd ditch the backwards complatibility, many of the sites would look like cheap ass, but it would be worth it because around a year after that, every site would be fixed anyway. But what I hear, is that they don't let evil people to decide these things...

lech

I would side with yout if everything was XHTML 1.0 Strict as the defacto standard. If the canvas rendered perfectly each and every time providing the markup was precise and the CSS allowed some leniency with chosen color selectors as it currently does, I would be all for it. In fact, I think it would be fair to say many many developers would back this type of movement. I think it's time to make a push towards something like this. Much in the way they want to make HDTV the standard and phase out existing sets, it's time to start with a clean slate and support ONLY that which will drive it forward, not hold it back.