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Style Textarea Resizers

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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.

View Demo

::-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.

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Discussion

  1. MaxArt

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

  2. Tiago Celestino

    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. Cubicle Ninjas

    Wow. I had no idea. Thanks for sharing!

  5. René Domingue

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

  6. Kush

    Is it possible to use this in IE ?

  7. Mick

    No love for Firefox?

    https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/resize

    • David Walsh

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

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