Full Width Textareas

By  on  

Working with textarea widths can be painful if you want the textarea to span 100% width.  Why painful?  Because if the textarea's containing element has padding, your "width:100%" textarea will likely stretch outside of the parent container -- a frustrating prospect to say the least.  Luckily there's a quick CSS solution to this problem!

The CSS

box-sizing to the rescue!

textarea {
	-webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
	-moz-box-sizing: border-box;
	box-sizing: border-box;

	width: 100%;
}

Setting the box-sizing to border-box allows the textarea to respect its parent container's padding and border, recalculating what 100% actually means.  If the box-sizing were content-box, the textarea would continue to stretch outside the parent container as it would have before.

Recent Features

  • By
    5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs.  Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers.  Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Zoomer Plugin

    I love to look around the MooTools Forge. As someone that creates lots of plugins, I get a lot of joy out of seeing what other developers are creating and possibly even how I could improve them. One great plugin I've found is...

  • By
    iPhone Click Effect Using MooTools or jQuery

    One thing I love about love about Safari on the iPhone is that Safari provides a darkened background effect when you click a link. It's the most subtle of details but just enforces than an action is taking place. So why not implement that...

Discussion

  1. Very nice. I’ve struggled with this in the past. Top tip

  2. Great tip. Thanks.

  3. Great tip.
    Is it support in all browser?

  4. brett

    last I checked, ie9 did not support this, but i think ie10 had plans to

  5. Actually it is quite well supported :
    Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, IE8+

    See : http://caniuse.com/#feat=css3-boxsizing

  6. See this Paul Irish link…

    http://paulirish.com/2012/box-sizing-border-box-ftw/

    Helps tremendously with mobile development as well and calculation of % width when utilizing this box-sizing.

  7. Tom

    Does not work for me (Win7, Firefox 15.0.1)

  8. I use Win7 64bits and tested with Firefox 15.0.1, IE9, Safari and Chrome. All working fine
    Be sure to use all 3 declarations for maximum compatibility:

    -moz-box-sizing: border-box;
    -webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
    box-sizing: border-box;
    
  9. Does not work for me too (Mac OS X, Chrome 26)

  10. Hmm… nice, I got saved! thanks for sharing :D

  11. Nice, it works…

  12. Hi David! First i should say thanks about what you have written, I have question, i have done whatever you said but i wanna get some space from around of its parent tag, and i gave it margin:10px . But it doesn’t work ! Why?

  13. Alf

    Doesn’t work for me (Windows 7 + Chrome 46.0.2490.80 m)

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!