Equal Height Columns – Companion Columns Method

The search for a technique that offers real equal height columns leads nowhere because we don’t have full vertical control in current CSS 2.1 implementations cross browser. The available techniques are simulations of columns: a repeated image displaying Faux Columns [Cederholm], columns made of borders [Livingstone], and variations.

We couldn’t even fall back on a (CSS-)table, since there is no broad, sufficient implementation of display: table in the browsers. And a table would dismiss the accessibility request for having the columns logically ordered in the source.

OneTrueLayout [Robinson] uses a promising technique [Challoner] where the columns are still not equal in height, but they are cut in length, so they appear as-if. Surprisingly, this trimming made problems that are not solved.

In this article, we draw up a variation for the equal heights columns illusion, standing on the shoulders of OneTrueLayout. Both techniques use excessive padding and compensating negative margins, a tricky concept…

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