XHTML HTML element with 100% height causing scrollbars

Question

In my CSS file I use this:

html,body{height:100%;padding:0;margin:0;border:0;}

Which causes a vertical scrollbar to appear on IE8, Chrome 5 and Mozilla 3.6, all latest version.

Also, the document is empty, it only has the html, head and body tags so nothing is going out of screen to cause that.

Setting overflow:hidden; on the html element will completly stop scrolling on the page.

How can I make it go away please but also keep scrolling when content is higher than display height?

Thank you.

Answer 1

The vertical scrollbar is coming because of height:100%. You don't need that unless there is a reason for you to use that.

Answer 2

There may be better ways but I simply default to 98% which seems to obviate scrollbars in all browsers.

you could also set the height using JavaScript but that feels a little hacky

Answer 3

overflow:hidden should help and prevent the display of scroll bars (you'll likely lose ~1px of content due to rounding errors

Answer 4

Why are you setting 100% height in body?

It will get this height by default.

It makes sense to set height in body only if you want to set a numeric height in px such as lets say 600px

Answer 5

I need 100% height in a XHTML document so that I can have div elements with 100%.

Anyway, I found the answer:

This problem only occurs when the top most element has a top margin. It seems that that top margin gets added to the 100% height making it higher and causing the scrollbar.

So either use padding-top to space the top most element or use a with no top margin between the tag and the next element with a top margin.