CSS Vertical Center with Flexbox
I'm 31 years old and feel like I've been in the web development game for centuries. We knew forever that layouts in CSS were a nightmare and we all considered flexbox our savior. Whether it turns out that way remains to be seen but flexbox does easily solve a problem CSS has had for far too long: CSS vertical centering. Let me show you how easy it is!
Vertical centering requires a parent and children elements...
<div class="flexbox-container"> <div>Blah blah</div> <div>Blah blah blah blah blah ...</div> </div>
...but only the parent element needs CSS properties set for the vertical centering of child elements:
.flexbox-container {
display: -ms-flexbox;
display: -webkit-flex;
display: flex;
-ms-flex-align: center;
-webkit-align-items: center;
-webkit-box-align: center;
align-items: center;
}
Aside from the vendor prefixes, that is some simple CSS! Vertical centering without flexbox is hopeful at best so it's encouraging that the future of CSS layouts will make this task easy. I'm still not sold on flexbox solving all of the web world's layout problems but solving vertical centering is quite an asset.
Two words: Mind blown!
I was just saying that despite being a developer for many years now, I still find it hard to vertical align anything. It shouldn’t be that hard!!! I’m looking forward to trying this out!
Thanks!
I’m still a bit confused about the behavior of the children (if one of them has a fixed width but the other one doesn’t, then the width of the first one isn’t really properly applied for example), but I haven’t looked into the whole flexbox thing enough so I’m sure that’s normal. Regardless, this example is already quite helpful for a bunch of situations.
Remind me, what versions of IE is this (flex-box) supported back to? Thanks
Answered my own question. Looks like it is only supported back to IE10 and even their it is partially supported using the
-ms-prefix.I don’t see any mentions of the browser support. After a quick test, it works in Firefox, Chrome, and IE10+.
Great post… regarding flexbox maybe this can help you:
http://codepen.io/hicTech/pen/emvMBw
Have been waiting for this for years! No more
margin-topor padding nightmares! Thanks..container { position: absolute; top: 50%; left: 50%; transform: translate3d(-50%,-50%,0); }i’m not a big fan of position: absolute; and transform(3d): translateY();
some browsers still support transform(3d) poorly..
i’m sticking to dispay: table; and display: table-cell; for now..
so i sure hope flexbox will become an adopted standard.. fast..
Yeah I would avoide translate3d positioning… some browsers put your elements on a half pixel rendering your UI blurry… mainly because the way translated elements are painted to screen is different. :(
Do the elements in HTML have to be in
DIVs? Can’t they be in HTML5articles?vertical align in flexbox is somewhat complicated because there are two modes for vertical-align, one for in-line vertical align and the other for in-container vertical-align.
check the “Cross Align” and “Multi Align” panel in this flexbox generator to see the effect:
http://loading.io/flexbox/
The odd thing for me is that when I copy and paste the html and css into an editor and launch the file it’s not working. Am I missing something?