HTML and CSS - Vertical align divs

Question

I have a div on the left hand side, and text on the right hand side. The text can be either 2 or 3 lines long, and I want the left hand div to be vertically centered to that text. I've looked online and it seems that all the ways to do this without using tables are complicated. Is there an easy way to do this?

Most suggestions seem to point to http://www.jakpsatweb.cz/css/css-vertical-center-solution.html which uses "CSS tables". Are CSS tables the way to go? Is that really better than just using HTML tables?

Answer 1

Yes, CSS tables are better than HTML tables because they do not imply any semantic meaning but are explicitly used to describe presentation.

However, for your case CSS's vertical-align works. For example: http://jsbin.com/itoyo3/edit.

Answer 2

You could do it with absolute positioning;

Change your code to look like this:

<div id="right-content"><div id="the-left-hand-div">whatever goes here</div><p>The content</p></div>

Set your css up like this:

#right-content {
    float: left;
    position: relative;
    margin-left: /*the width of the the left div content plus any margin you want*/
}

#the-left-hand-div {
    position: absolute;
    left: /*negative width of the the-left-hand-div plus any margin you want*/
    top: /*height of #right-content - the-left-hand-div divided by 2 - this could be a negative value if the-left-hand-div is higher than the right-content*/
}