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Can a child influence its parent's size in Standards mode?

Answer 1

+2 A:

No: in standards mode, the default overflow property of a container should be set to visible meaning that overflowing content will be rendered outside the container's clipping area. There's no such overflow option as to grow the container's size to match its children. You can see more on overflow here

However there are methods of growing the container to match its children's size. In standards mode, the correct way of doing that is setting the CSS property min-height instead of the property height.

Since the height enforcing behavior doesn't happen in IE6, people usually end up setting both min-height for standards-compliant browsers and then either set height for IE only with conditional comments or by prefixing the property name with an underscore _ so IE6 will use it but other browsers will ignore it.

So your div would be something like

<div id="mydiv" style="width:500px;min-height:500px;_height:500px;border:4px solid red">

You can find more info on min-height here and a quick Google/Bing search for min-height IE6 will give you all the answers you need.

Miguel Ventura 2009-11-11 00:56:30

Perhaps I phrased my question too literally. In my case I actually want the parent div to not stray from 500px. If its children add up to be greater than 500px, I want them to spill out beyond their parent. It seems like standards mode browsers always enforce this. I am curious if perhaps there is an edge case people are aware of that a standards mode browser will cause the parent to grow to encompass its children.If I wanted the parent to grow to accommodate its children, it sounds like min-height would be the way to go.

Matt Greer 2009-11-11 01:04:08

@Matt sorry! I've edited the answer (added 1st paragraph) to better match the question :)

Miguel Ventura 2009-11-11 01:34:12

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Can a child influence its parent's size in Standards mode?

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