Get Element Dimensions After CSS Transform

By  on  

I've been playing a lot with meta viewports recently due to seeing many HTML5 TV apps coded explicitly for 1280x720 which you'll see on many HD televisions.  We all know that it's a much better practice to use responsive design than hardcode dimensions but, that aside, meta viewports are meant to do the scaling.  So it's CSS transforms, specifically scale(), to the rescue.

In creating a meta viewport shim, I needed to calculate an element's dimensions after it had been scaled.  Properties like clientWidth and innerWidth will return the element's original width, ignoring the transform.  To get the scaled size you must use getBoundingClientRect:

var originalWidth = myElement.innerWidth; // 1280
var originalHeight = myElement.innerHeight; // 720

originalElement.style.transform = 'scale(1.5)';

console.log(originalElement.getBoundingClientRect());

/*
ClientRect {
  bottom: 1080
  height: 1080
  left: 0
  right: 1920
  top: 0
  width: 1920
}
*/

The example above sets the scale and returns different desired height and width dimensions based on the scale.  getBoundingClientRect returns more than just height and width by position coordinates as well.

I was worried I wouldn't be able to accomplish this feat but getBoundingClientRect was the perfect solution!

Recent Features

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

  • By
    6 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefox OS

    Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason:  Mozilla's finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they've been creating them for years -- with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.  Firefox OS has been rapidly improving...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Vertically Centering with Flexbox

    Vertically centering sibling child contents is a task we've long needed on the web but has always seemed way more difficult than it should be.  We initially used tables to accomplish the task, then moved on to CSS and JavaScript tricks because table layout was horribly...

  • By
    Create an Animated Sliding Button Using MooTools

    Buttons (or links) are usually the elements on our sites that we want to draw a lot of attention to. Unfortunately many times they end up looking the most boring. You don't have to let that happen though! I recently found a...

Discussion

  1. Hello, David,

    I want to remind you, that only Gecko is adding height and width as can be read in the note at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/getBoundingClientRect#Return_value.

    Compare it to MSDN: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536433%28VS.85%29.aspx

    So your solution is not cross-browser-compatible.

    I’d look for whether jQuery can solve it and then inspect their solution ;-)

  2. This is a good solution but it has limited application. I guess we need to work a bit more on looking for answers that may be applied to multiple scenarios instead of specific ones.

  3. Dan

    This might be a very simple question but wondered if you could help.

    Is it possible to calculate the scale factor based on the height and width of an element, I think its the math I’m struggling with.

    If I know my element is 1280 x 720 to begin with …

    … and after scaling the element I know the dimensions are: 1920 x 1080

    How do I calculate the scale (1.5)?

  4. Ben

    Dan, it’s just “1920 / 1280 = 1.5”, or “1080 / 720 = 1.5”. The scale is just the ratio between the height of one to the height of the other, or the width of one to the width of the other.

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