How to y(vertically) center body.

[nixnerd]

Hey, I have an issue that I’ve never really considered before:

I build all my sites on a laptop. My laptop’s screen is only 13 inches. I recently took a look at one of my sites on my friends HUGE monitor.

Alas, all my content on non-scrollable pages looked awkwardly short and high on the screen.

Is there a way to center the entire body on the y axis? I.e. up and down?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[darcher]

There are a few ways to do it, it’s definitely one of the overlooked things of design. Vertical alignment is shaky at best.

The best results I’ve turned are from using a setup similar to this:

body {display:table;height:100%;width:100%;}
header,main,footer{display:table-row;width:100%;}
main {height:80%}
header,footer {height:10%}

At this point you could set vertical alignment as all height is set in the parent elements. Gets rather wonky if you attempt to have a responsive design site, so I suggest using progressive enhancement with block and inline-block level elements first then transitioning to the table method with media queries.

[BaliBalo]

If you does not mind targetting quite modern browsers only you can use pseudo elements:

html, body { height: 100%; }
body { text-align: center; }
body::before
{
content: ”;
display: inline-block;
height: 100%;
vertical-align: middle;
}
#content
{
display: inline-block;
}

[maxisix]

here’s an exemple : http://codepen.io/maxisix/pen/sEBla

[Author]

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