Full Width Textareas

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Working with textarea widths can be painful if you want the textarea to span 100% width.  Why painful?  Because if the textarea's containing element has padding, your "width:100%" textarea will likely stretch outside of the parent container -- a frustrating prospect to say the least.  Luckily there's a quick CSS solution to this problem!

The CSS

box-sizing to the rescue!

textarea {
	-webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
	-moz-box-sizing: border-box;
	box-sizing: border-box;

	width: 100%;
}

Setting the box-sizing to border-box allows the textarea to respect its parent container's padding and border, recalculating what 100% actually means.  If the box-sizing were content-box, the textarea would continue to stretch outside the parent container as it would have before.

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Discussion

  1. Very nice. I’ve struggled with this in the past. Top tip

  2. Great tip. Thanks.

  3. Great tip.
    Is it support in all browser?

  4. brett

    last I checked, ie9 did not support this, but i think ie10 had plans to

  5. Actually it is quite well supported :
    Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, IE8+

    See : http://caniuse.com/#feat=css3-boxsizing

  6. See this Paul Irish link…

    http://paulirish.com/2012/box-sizing-border-box-ftw/

    Helps tremendously with mobile development as well and calculation of % width when utilizing this box-sizing.

  7. Tom

    Does not work for me (Win7, Firefox 15.0.1)

  8. I use Win7 64bits and tested with Firefox 15.0.1, IE9, Safari and Chrome. All working fine
    Be sure to use all 3 declarations for maximum compatibility:

    -moz-box-sizing: border-box;
    -webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
    box-sizing: border-box;
    
  9. Does not work for me too (Mac OS X, Chrome 26)

  10. Hmm… nice, I got saved! thanks for sharing :D

  11. Nice, it works…

  12. Hi David! First i should say thanks about what you have written, I have question, i have done whatever you said but i wanna get some space from around of its parent tag, and i gave it margin:10px . But it doesn’t work ! Why?

  13. Alf

    Doesn’t work for me (Windows 7 + Chrome 46.0.2490.80 m)

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