Style Textarea Resizers

By  on  

Modern browsers are nice in that they allow you to style some odd properties.  Heck, one of the most popular posts on this blog is HTML5 Placeholder Styling with CSS, a tiny but useful task.  Did you know you can also restyle the textarea resizer in WebKit browsers?  Let me show you how!

The CSS

One of WebKit's lessor known CSS artifacts is the ::-webkit-resizer pseudo:

/* transparent resizer */
::-webkit-resizer{ background-color:transparent; }

/* colorful resizer */
#colorful::-webkit-resizer{ background-color: pink; }

/* background resizer */
#bgresizer::-webkit-resizer{ background-image: url(resizer-background.png); }

::-webkit-resizer can be used by itself, changing all resizer displays, or on individual elements.

::-webkit-resizer certainly isn't a game-changer but it is another level of control most developers don't know is possible.  I do find the default resizer ugly so I may experiment with something nicer in the future.

Recent Features

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

  • By
    Conquering Impostor Syndrome

    Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense.  I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions.  I've even caught myself reading the post...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    dwImageProtector Plugin for jQuery

    I've always been curious about the jQuery JavaScript library. jQuery has captured the hearts of web designers and developers everywhere and I've always wondered why. I've been told it's easy, which is probably why designers were so quick to adopt it NOT that designers...

  • By
    Styling CSS Print Page Breaks

    It's important to construct your websites in a fashion that lends well to print. I use a page-break CSS class on my websites to tell the browser to insert a page break at strategic points on the page. During the development of my...

Discussion

  1. MaxArt

    Whoa, I knew about scrollbars, but not about the resizer.
    Thanks for the info!

  2. so awesome. =)

  3. Stophe

    Cool. Thanks. The options to style the resizer with css only seem to be fairly limited though ;)
    http://jsfiddle.net/CkLQD/1/

  4. Wow. I had no idea. Thanks for sharing!

  5. Too bad you cannot style the over, neither with an animation : http://cdpn.io/aoeJA

  6. Is it possible to use this in IE ?

    • That page doesn’t say anything about styling the resizer.

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