AutoGrow Textareas with CSS

By  on  

As the demands of the web change and developers experiment with different user experiences, the need for more native language improvements expands. Our presentation layer, CSS, has done incredibly well in improving capabilities, even if sometimes too slow. The need for native support for automatically expanding textarea elements has been long known...and it's finally here!

To allow textarea elements to grow vertically and horizontally, add the field-sizing property with a value of content:

textarea {
  field-sizing: content; // default is `fixed`
}

The default value for field-sizing is fixed, signaling current behavior. The new behavior, content, will expand as much as possible. To constrain the size a textarea can grow, use traditional width/max-width and height/max-height properties.

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    HTML5 Datalist

    One of the most used JavaScript widgets over the past decade has been the text box autocomplete widget.  Every JavaScript framework has their own autocomplete widget and many of them have become quite advanced.  Much like the placeholder attribute's introduction to markup, a frequently used...

  • By
    Create Spinning Rays with CSS3 Animations & JavaScript

    Thomas Fuchs, creator of script2 (scriptaculous' second iteration) and Zepto.js (mobile JavaScript framework), creates outstanding animated elements with JavaScript.  He's a legend in his own right, and for good reason:  his work has helped to inspire developers everywhere to drop Flash and opt...

Discussion

  1. Michael

    Sorry for asking, but is field-sizing: content; really finally there? At least on my Mac with Google Chrome 120.0.6099.129 in the DevTools it says “unkown property name”, same goes for Safari 16.2 (18614.3.7.1.5) and Firefox 112.0.2 (64-Bit).
    thanks Michael

  2. CSS working ⚒

  3. As of January 2024, this doesn’t work yet in any stable browser.

    Looking at the Chrome status for this feature, it appears that it won’t ship until Chrome 122. (At the time of this writing, latest Chrome is 120.)

    The web standards explainer doc for this gives more details.

  4. I needed to test with Ionic and it works perfectly post chrome 123. Works on android web view as well

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