I, for one, don’t like to see a perfectly valid CSS layout mingled with some tables just for this purpose. So, if you want to know how you can achieve vertical-align functionality the right way, read on.

Step 1 — One line vertical-align:middle

This one is quite easy. Let’s say you set up a nice graphical container for your text but when you add the text, it just sticks to the top of your container — not a very nice visual effect. To center it vertically, simply specify the line-height for your text the same height as that of the container’s.

See a full working example

Things get a bit more complicated when you have more than one line of text. Stick around and we’ll fix this too.

Step 2 — Multiple lines (one line) vertical-align:bottom

An absolute positioned div inside a relative positioned one can basically be placed anywhere you want inside the parent div. So we’ll just use this setup and absolute position a div with bottom:0 within a relative positioned one. The relative positioned div inherits its height from its parent.

See a full working example

Step 3 — Multiple lines vertical-align:middle

This must be the trickiest part of the vertical-align functionality to be achieved with CSS. If we were to just use the trick from Step2 and set the absolutely aligned div to top:50% or bottom:50%, this would align the top part of the text (or its baseline) at the middle — so its not really middle vertically aligned. We could use the actual vertical-align property but it only works for inline elements, so we should use display:table and display:table-cell for the enclosing divs.

All nice and easy but for one problem: IE — it doesn’t recognize display:table. Nevertheless that shouldn’t stop us. We’ll use this setup and achieve the desired result even though only for last-generation browsers.

So, how can we trick IE in vertically aligning the text? We’ll use its bugs against it. IE has some issues with rendering relative and absolute positioned elements. I won’t go into details on this specific bug right here as I don’t want to complicate things even more. The important thing to remember is the solution to this practical problem: positioning a relative div into an absolute one into a relative one once again. Weird, huh? Let me try and explain a bit better: we already have the relative positioned container from the last setup where we want to vertically align the text. Inside it we’ll place an absolute positioned div at top:50%, and inside this one another div relatively positioned at top:-50%. Ta da! It works even for IE.

So now, let’s combine the two solutions and create one that works on every browser. We’ll use the attributes for the modern browsers in a way that IE can’t read them (with some help from the direct child selector), and then, also add the code for IE.

See a full working example

That’s it. Have fun working with vertical align and CSS layouts, and always remember: there’s not been yet a layout that couldn’t be coded with CSS.