Make Nested Div Stretch to 100% of Remaining Container Div Height

Make nested div stretch to 100% of remaining container div height

I have spent way too much time trying to figure it out, but by George I've got it!

The "Eureka" moment was reading other questions where people were asking "how can I do it without using tables?" Because of course this layout is easy with tables. But that made me think of display:table.

As this blog post nicely argues, using display:table gives you table layouts without the nasty mark-up overhead as HTML table layouts, allowing you to have semantic code and different layouts for different media queries.

I did end up having to make one change to the mark-up: a wrapper <div> around the image. Also, max/min heights are all weird when dealing with table displays: height settings are treated as preferred heights given the constraints of parent and child elements. So setting a height of zero on a display:table-row wrapper div made that row fit to the content image exactly. Setting a height of 100% on the content div made it nicely fill the space in between the image and the minimum height of the parent container.

Voila!

Condensing just the essential code:

body {
  overflow-y: scroll;
  overflow-x: hidden;
}

body,
html {
  height: 100%;
}

.container {
  display: table;
  width: 100% height: 100%;
  /* this will be treated as a Minimum! It will stretch to fit content */
}

div.wrapper {
  display: table-row;
  height: 0px;
  /* take as little as possible, while still fitting content */
}

img {
  display: table-cell;
  width: 100%;
  /*scale to fit*/
}

.bottom {
  display: table-cell;
  height: 100%;
  /* take as much as possible */
}

<div class="container">
  <div class="wrapper">
    <img src="http://placekitten.com/600/250" />
  </div>
  <div class="bottom" contentEditable="true">
  </div>

stretching inner div to full height of screen and content with overflow

At the moment the height of the container for the 1 million "contents" .contentcolumn is set to exactly match that of the flex item parent <div class="c2 content"> with the help of height: 100%;.

Naturally, the background(-color) of .contentcolumn will just affect the overflowing items up to this height and won't "follow" the vertically overflowing text content.

By setting the height definition of .contentcolumn to min-height, that text container:

will overflow in accordance with his text contents height,
will always have at least the height of his parent flex item

.contentcolumn {
  width: 100%;
  max-width: 300px;
  margin: auto;
  // height: 100%;
  min-height: 100%;   <= swapped height with min-height the height property of that container to make it fully cover its text content vertically
}

Make inner div fill remaining height using flex

I edited @Sfili_81's answer and added these to the *

margin: 0;
padding: 0;

Here's the entire code

* {
  box-sizing: border-box;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

.home-content {
  display: flex;
  border: 1px solid black;
  height: 100vh;
  flex-flow: column;
}

.container {
  flex: 1;
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  border: 1px solid red;
}

#listItems {
  border: 3px solid green;
  flex: 1 1 100%;
}

<div class="home-section">
  <div class="home-content">
    <div class="container">
      <form>
        <label for="example">Input</label>
        <input type="text" name="example">
      </form>
      <div id="listItems">

      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

CSS nested div height 100%

Solved:

#container {
    background: #FFFFFF;
    padding: 10px 50px 0;
    height: 100%;
    width:780px;
    position:absolute;
}

Make a div fill the height of the remaining screen space

2015 update: the flexbox approach

There are two other answers briefly mentioning flexbox; however, that was more than two years ago, and they don't provide any examples. The specification for flexbox has definitely settled now.

Note: Though CSS Flexible Boxes Layout specification is at the Candidate Recommendation stage, not all browsers have implemented it. WebKit implementation must be prefixed with -webkit-; Internet Explorer implements an old version of the spec, prefixed with -ms-; Opera 12.10 implements the latest version of the spec, unprefixed. See the compatibility table on each property for an up-to-date compatibility status.

(taken from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/CSS/Flexible_boxes)

All major browsers and IE11+ support Flexbox. For IE 10 or older, you can use the FlexieJS shim.

To check current support you can also see here:
http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox

Working example

With flexbox you can easily switch between any of your rows or columns either having fixed dimensions, content-sized dimensions or remaining-space dimensions. In my example I have set the header to snap to its content (as per the OPs question), I've added a footer to show how to add a fixed-height region and then set the content area to fill up the remaining space.

html,body {  height: 100%;  margin: 0;}
.box {  display: flex;  flex-flow: column;  height: 100%;}
.box .row {  border: 1px dotted grey;}
.box .row.header {  flex: 0 1 auto;  /* The above is shorthand for:  flex-grow: 0,  flex-shrink: 1,  flex-basis: auto  */}
.box .row.content {  flex: 1 1 auto;}
.box .row.footer {  flex: 0 1 40px;}

<!-- Obviously, you could use HTML5 tags like `header`, `footer` and `section` -->
<div class="box">  <div class="row header">    <p><b>header</b>      <br />      <br />(sized to content)</p>  </div>  <div class="row content">    <p>      <b>content</b>      (fills remaining space)    </p>  </div>  <div class="row footer">    <p><b>footer</b> (fixed height)</p>  </div></div>

Make Nested Div Stretch to 100% of Remaining Container Div Height