How to get height of entire document with JavaScript?

Question

Some documents I can\'t get the height of the document (to position something absolutely at the very bottom). Additionally, a padding-bottom on seems to do nothing on these

Answer 1

The "jQuery method" of determining the document size - query everything, take the highest value, and hope for the best - works in most cases, but not in all of them .

If you really need bullet-proof results for the document size, I'd suggest you use my jQuery.documentSize plugin. Unlike the other methods, it actually tests and evaluates browser behaviour when it is loaded and, based on the result, queries the right property from there on out.

The impact of this one-time test on performance is minimal, and the plugin returns the right results in even the weirdest scenarios - not because I say so, but because a massive, auto-generated test suite actually verifies that it does.

Because the plugin is written in vanilla Javascript, you can use it without jQuery, too.