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Cross-Browser Issue: Dealing With an UI Problem Arising Due to Floating HTML Elements in Open Event Webapp

A few days back, I came across a rather interesting but hard to debug bug. The weird part was that it presented itself only on particular browsers like Firefox and didn’t exist on other browsers like Chrome.

In Open Event Webapp, we have collapsible session elements on track, room and schedule pages. The uncollapsed element would show you the major details like the title of the session, its type, name and a small thumbnail picture of the speaker. If the user clicks on it, then the element would collapse and more detail would pop up which would include the detailed description of the session and the speaker(s) presenting it.

Now, the problem which was occurring was that the collapsible sessions on the rooms page were behaving erratically. They were collapsing predictably but left behind a huge white space after they wound up on clicking. I have attached some screenshots to better demonstrate the problem. At first, I was confused. Because the same thing worked perfectly on Chrome.

collapsed.png

Collapsed State

uncollapsed.png

On Clicking Again

The actual solution for this problem turned out to be quite short (a one-liner in fact) but it took me a little while to solve it and actually understand what was going on. The solution:-

.room-filter {
 overflow: hidden;
}

Here, room-filter is the class applied to the session element.

Wait? But how did that solved the problem? Read on!!

As I mentioned in the title, the problem arises due to the floating HTML elements. I am just going to give a quick introduction to the float property. In case you want to read more about it, I have provided links at the end of the article which you can go through for a detailed explanation. Float is a CSS positioning property. It tells whether an element would shift to the right or left of its parent container or another floated element while other HTML elements like images, text and inline elements would wrap around it. One popular analogy which is often given is that of a textbook where the text wraps around the images. We can say that the image is floating to the left (or right) while the text wraps around it.

But how is this problem related to the floating elements still remain unclear? Hold on. This is the structure of the session div on the rooms page:

<div class="room-filter" id="{{session_id}}">

<div class="eventtime col-xs-2 col-sm-2 col-md-2">
<!-- Some Content -->
</div>

<div class="room-container">
<div class="left-border col-xs-10 col-sm-10 col-md-10">
<!-- Some Content -->
</div>
</div>

</div>

 

As we can see from the code, we have a session div with two divs inside it. We have applied bootstrap grid classes to them. These bootstrap layout classes actually make the elements float with a specified width (You can check it on the developer console). So, we have two floating div elements inside the parent div. Remember that although the floating elements remain the part of the document, they are taken outside of the normal flow of the page. Since the parent div here contain nothing but the floating elements, its height collapses to zero.

Because of this, Firefox was not able to correctly expand and collapse the session element because it’s actual height was not being computed and was set to zero. Now, if we apply any of the properties which can make the height of the parent element non-zero, we would be able to solve this problem. Chrome somehow managed to escape this issue and worked predictably.

To make the height non-zero, we apply this property:-

.room-filter {
   overflow: hidden;
}

An intuitive reason to explain why this fixes the problem is that when the element is in its default state (overflow: visible), it does not need to calculate its height to display properly. Once we set overflow: hidden, it needs to see whether the max-height or max-width has been surpassed and hence it needs to calculate its dimensions. Once the height is calculated, it is used in layout and the element no longer collapses.

correct.png

Problem solved.

Another alternative solution to solve the problem can be:

.room-filter {
   display: inline-block;
   width: 100%;
}

In case you want to read more about the float property, you can consult these links:

https://css-tricks.com/all-about-floats/

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/10/the-mystery-of-css-float-property/

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