Make child div stretch across width of page

Answer 1

Since position: absolute; and viewport width were no options in my special case, there is another quick solution to solve the problem. The only condition is, that overflow in x-direction is not necessary for your website.

You can define negative margins for your element:

#help_panel {
    margin-left: -9999px;
    margin-right: -9999px;
}

But since we get overflow doing this, we have to avoid overflow in x-direction globally e.g. for body:

body {
    overflow-x: hidden;
}

You can set padding to choose the size of your content.

Note that this solution does not bring 100% width for content, but it is helpful in cases where you need e.g. a background color which has full width with a content still depending on container.