I have the following HTML code:
<header id="header">
<h1><span id="titlu-pagina">Watercolors</span></h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="#">About Me</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Where To Find Me</a></li>
<li><a href="#">The Blog</a></li>
</ul>
</header>
and the respective CSS one:
#header {
height: 800px;
text-align: center;
border-bottom: 1px solid black;
background-color: #734C8F;
background-image: url('10.jpg');
-webkit-background-size: cover;
-moz-background-size: cover;
-o-background-size: cover;
background-size: cover !important;
}
I am trying to set up an image as a background for the header but for some reason the image is not displayed in its full size. I've tried low res images and still, some parts are cut from it. If I resize the browser the image scales and in the end it gets to its full size.
If I change the code to
background-image: url('10.jpg') no-repeat center center fixed;
the image doesn't display at all. What am I doing wrong? I've tried the code in all browser but the result is the same.
Looks like this is/was simply a misunderstanding on your end, of what background-size: cover actually does.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/background-size:
[cover] scales the image as large as possible and maintains image aspect ratio (image doesn't get squished). The image "covers" the entire width or height of the container. When the image and container have different dimensions, the image is clipped either left/right or top/bottom.
(“When the image and container have different dimensions” should rather be “have different aspect ratios” – because if they had not different dimensions, but width and height of image and element would be exactly the same, then we would not need to apply background-size in the first place.)
If you want the image to get “squished” instead of clipped – then use background-size: 100% 100%.
Can I ask you when is generally recommended to use the 100% 100% background-size and when it would be better to use :cover? It's not very clear to me how are they doing two different things in terms of covering the container.
background-size: 100% 100% means, stretch the image in both dimensions to 100% of the respective container dimension. If the aspect ratio of the image and the element don’t match, the image will be distorted/squished.
cover however is intended to scale the image to be as large as possible, while keeping it’s aspect ratio.
Think of it like watching a movie on your TV screen. Cinema aspect ratio and TV aspect ratio usually differ (or at least used to, with older TVs.) Now usually you’d want to see all of what is going on in the picture, and not miss anything that happens “on the sides” of the it. Therefor the movie is scaled in a way that it covers the whole width (or height) of the screen, and you get black bars on the top and the bottom (or left/right) – thereby the aspect ratio of the movie is kept – because you would not want to watch a movie distorted, that just looks weird when car tires are ovals and the people have unnaturally wide or long faces.
That analogy make things clearer …?