title: Seeking CSS Browser compatibility information for setting width using left and right
body: <p>Here's a question that's been haunting me for a year now. The root question is how do I set the size of an element relative to its parent so that it is inset by N pixels from every edge? Setting the width would be nice, but you don't know the width of the parent, and you want the elements to resize with the window. (You don't want to use percents because you need a specific number of pixels.) </p>
  
  <p>Edit
  I also need to prevent the content (or lack of content) from stretching or shrinking both elements. First answer I got was to use padding on the parent, which would work great. I want the parent to be exactly 25% wide, and exactly the same height as the browser client area, without the child being able to push it and get a scroll bar.
  /Edit</p>
  
  <p>I tried solving this problem using {top:Npx;left:Npx;bottom:Npx;right:Npx;} but it only works in certain browsers.</p>
  
  <p>I could potentially write some javascript with jquery to fix all elements with every page resize, but I'm not real happy with that solution. (What if I want the top offset by 10px but the bottom only 5px? It gets complicated.)</p>
  
  <p>What I'd like to know is either how to solve this in a cross-browser way, or some list of browsers which allow the easy CSS solution. Maybe someone out there has a trick that makes this easy.</p>