I have a page layout with a sidebar alongside a main-content div. Partway down the page, I have a div (parent) inside of a div (child). The child div needs to be horizontally centered relative to the screen instead of the parent.
<div class="sidebar"></div>
<div class="main-content">
<div class="parent">
<div class="child"></div>
<div class="other-stuff"></div>
</div>
</div>
<style>
.parent{
width: 100px;
}
.child{
width: 200px;
}
</style>
My first thought was using absolute positioning with something like this:
.child{
position: absolute;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
left: 0;
right: 0;
text-align: center;
}
The problem I faced here was that I had to make up for the extra space due to the child being taken out of document flow. "Other-stuff" wanted to move up to fill the gap left behind.
Is there a better way to accomplish this beyond just pushing the div around with absolute positioning and adding extra margin/padding to make up the space so the lower content doesn't come up?
I'm open to abandoning absolute positioning — that was just the first thing that came to mind.
You can use a flexbox to position multiple items in one container and knock the children out of the parent div so it's not affected by whatever positioning you do with that.
*,
*::before,
*::after {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
box-sizing: border-box;
}
body {
width: 100vw;
}
.parent {
border: 1px solid black;
width: 100px;
height: fit-content;
}
.container {
display: flex;
flex-direction: column;
align-items: center;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
gap: 2px;
}
.child {
display: block;
border: 1px solid black;
width: 200px;
height: fit-content;
}
.other-stuff {
display: block;
border: 1px solid black;
width: 200px;
height: fit-content;
}<div class="sidebar"></div>
<div class="main-content">
<div class="parent">
I'm the Parent
</div>
<div class="container">
<div class="child">I'm the Child</div>
<div class="other-stuff">I'm the Other Stuff</div>
</div>
</div>