CSS, Stretching vertically div until it reach the height of its parent [duplicate]

Answer 1

Here is one way of doing it.

Apply the following CSS:

html, body{ height: 100%; margin: 0;}
body{ background-color: #e3e3e3;}

#pagewrapper{
    margin: 0 auto;
    position: relative;
    width: 600px;
    height: 100%;
}
header{ 
    display:block;
    width: 100%;
    height: 100px;
    background: yellow;
}
#contentwrapper{
    width: 100%;
    position: absolute;
    top: 100px;
    bottom: 100px;
    left: 0;
    background: blue;
}
#navwrapper{
    width: 100%;
    position: absolute;
    height: 100px;
    bottom: 0px;
    left: 0;
    background: green;
}

Since you specified heights for the header and #navwrapper block elements, you can use absolute positioning with respect to the parent #pagewrapper block to set the bottom and top offsets for #contentwrapper and the bottom offset for #navwrapper.

If you see a scroll bar, you may need to set margin: 0 for either the html and/or body tags.

Demo fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/audetwebdesign/yUs6r/

Answer 2

You can try adding this script in your section after your CSS is called. It will find the heights of your head/foot elements and make the height in the center div fill the screen. This is good because if you decide to make your header/footer elements heights dynamic this script will still work.

<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.1.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
        var totalHeight = $('#pageWrapper').height();
        totalHeight -= $('header').height();
        totalHeight -= $('#navWrapper').height();

        // Remove an extra 20px for good measure
        totalHeight -= 10;

        $('#contentWrapper').css('height', 'auto');
        $('#contentWrapper').css('min-height', totalHeight);
});
</script>