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

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Duplicate the jQuery Homepage Tooltips Using Dojo

    The jQuery homepage has a pretty suave tooltip-like effect as seen below: Here's how to accomplish this same effect using Dojo. The XHTML The above HTML was taken directly from the jQuery homepage -- no changes. The CSS The above CSS has been slightly modified to match the CSS rules already...

  • By
    PHP / MooTools 1.2 Accordion Helper

    The MooTools Accordion plugin seems to be the plugin that people seem to have the most problems with. It's an awesome plugin, so I can see why so many people want to use it, but I think that may be part of the problem.

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!