Vertically centring in css (without hacks and multi-line enabled)

Chris Coyier over at css-tricks.com had a great example of a css conun­drum: how to centre, both ver­tic­ally and hori­zont­ally, mul­tiple lines of text. He some good code (using table-cell) but his code for IE relied on some (script)expressions which can have the unfor­tu­nate habbit of slow­ing down a page.

[update: to get a bit more back­ground on abso­lute & rel­at­ive pos­i­tion­ing, and how to cen­ter hori­zont­ally, read:  On Horizontal CSS Centering using Absolute Positioning or how Relative Positioning can rock your css.]

The reg­u­lar way of ver­tic­ally cent­ring in css has been doc­u­mented by Dušan Janovský back in 2004. It needs an extra div for its IE solu­tion, but it doesn’t require any expres­sions, only reg­u­lar (fast!) css. Because a div-tag is semantic­ally empty (like the span-tag), it doesn’t add any wrong semantic mean­ing (like a table-tag would).

The .area div isn’t stricly neces­sary, but it was in the ori­ginal prob­lem posed in the css-tricks.com art­icle. I have how­ever edited out the super­flu­ous back­ground declar­a­tion, as it doesn’t have any­thing to do with positioning.

I’ve updated the example to use con­di­tional com­ments instead of hacks. The html (in your page) becomes:

<div class="area" id="two">
<div class="bubble">
<div>
<p>Doing this may not be as easy or obvious as we would hope.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>


The css (in your stylesheet) becomes:

.area {width:300px; height:300px; position:relative; float:left; }
.bubble {position:absolute; left:93px; top:21px; width:135px; height:84px; display:table; }
.bubble div {display:table-cell; vertical-align:middle; text-align:center;}


The IE spe­cific css (in your html-page) becomes:

<!--[if lt IE 8]>
<style>
.bubble div {position:absolute; top:50%;}
.bubble div p {position:relative; top:-50%}
</style>
<![endif]–>

Have a look at the demo to see what you should end up with. Questions welcome!

On: CSS • 14th July of 2009