title: CSS: 100% page height, no scrolling, working in IE7
body: <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>So far I've found the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>position: absolute;
  height: 100%;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Results in adding scrolling if it's not already there AND if the content naturally requires scrolling the background will stop early.</p>
  
  <pre><code>position: absolute;
  bottom: 0;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Works exactly right on Firefox and Chrome, but not IE7+</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>