In CSS, getting a logo to position over a central layout and stick out to the left?

Question

Hello there, I'm really stuck here...

I have a site layout with a central layout (it's about 922px width, centered on the page)... I have a little logo that is to the top left of this, but it sticks about 10 pixels to the left of the central design. If you can imagine, it sort of sticks out to the left of the design...

Now, I was told that absolute positioning would make this happen. But I can't see how the logo would work with absolute positioning if the design itself it in the center of the page. I think this is to make sure it works in IE6... I have tried floating the logo in the central header, and then applying a negative margin of margin-left: -10px; which does work, but I've read this doesn't work in IE6.

Thank you for any help here. Appreciate it.

Answer 1

Set "position: relative" on a container div.

<style type="text/css">
    div.page {
        position: relative;
        margin: 0 auto;
        width: 922px;
    }
    div.page img.logo {
        position: absolute;
        left: -10px; top: 0;
    }
</style>


<div class="page">
    <img class="logo" ... />
</div>

Though.. I would rather make it work without absolute positioning.

Answer 2

Without a snippet of code its hard to tell, but it's probably an issue with where your element is getting it's 'absolute' positioning from. 'Absolute' is a misnomer. It really means "absolute...relative to the nearest positioned parent". So if in your design, you don't have a parent element with the css "position" style on it, it's going to take its position from the body element (which may have some margin/padding on it depending on your browser).

Adding a position: relative; to the element that you want to be the "outermost" container will allow you to specify position: absolute on an item within it, and specify your exact coordinates from there.

Answer 3

When you position your logo absolutely it needs to be placed relative to something. That something is normally the viewport edge. If the logo is inside an element that is positioned relatively then it will instead be positioned relative to that element. So the answer is to make your centered page div display:relative; so the logo always aligns to the page not to the edge of the browser window. Here is an example:

The HTML:

<div id="centeredpage">
   <img id="logo"... />
</div>

The CSS:

body {
   text-align:center;
}
#centeredpage {
   width:922px;
   margin:0 auto;
   text-align:left;
   position:relative;
}
#logo {
   position:absolute;
   top:0;
   left:-10px;
}

I hope that helps.