Preface: I have read probably 3 dozen answers on here about 100% height CSS in IE7, but none seem to answer my extremely simple question. If this is a duplicate, I apologize, but I cannot find the existing answer.
Question: I have a simple website with a navigation bar on the left side. On some pages the content of the page requires scrolling down, on other pages it does not.
I want to make it so that the navigation background extends all the way to the bottom of the page, regardless of whether scrolling is required or not, but I do not want to introduce scrolling if the content does not already require it.
So far I've found the following:
position: absolute; height: 100%;
Results in adding scrolling if it's not already there AND if the content naturally requires scrolling the background will stop early.
position: absolute; bottom: 0;
Works exactly right on Firefox and Chrome, but not IE7+
I figured a work-around of repeating a background image on the HTML element of the color, but that means if I want to change the color I have to generate a new image, which seems silly.