IE offsetHeight: Height undefined if Height is set to ‘Auto’
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009In order get the height of a div in IE when the height is set to auto (or not set), use offsetHeight. I generally do not set the height of a div if I want the height to be determined by the the content inside the div. I was working on a YUI widget that is similar to my imAnimTabber JQuery plugin. I used YUI’s animation utility to display the tabbedd content. When using the animation object, you have to specify the attribute that is to animated and the value the attribute should be set to:
{height: {to: ’100px ‘}}
Because the height of the divs for the tabbed widget is dependent upon the content, I do not know what the height of the content will be. To get the height of each div in Firefox, I simply called the getStyle Dom method (YUI):
YAHOO.util.Dom.getStyle(element, ‘height’);
Of course, IE returned ‘undefined’ as the height value. So, I first had to determine if the user was using ie and then use ie’s offsetHeight to determine the height:
if (YAHOO.env.ua.ie) {
var el = YAHOO.util.Dom.get('element');
var h = el.offsetHeight;
}
Since we know that Microsoft is not going to change ie, I hope that YUI will change their getStyle Dom method so that it can accommodate the various browser inconsistencies.
