Full Width Textareas

By  on  

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.

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

  • By
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Creating the Treehouse Frog Animation

    Before we start, I want to say thank you to David for giving me this awesome opportunity to share this experience with you guys and say that I'm really flattered. I think that CSS animations are really great. When I first learned how CSS...

  • By
    HTML5 Input Types Alternative

    As you may know, HTML5 has introduced several new input types: number, date, color, range, etc. The question is: should you start using these controls or not? As much as I want to say "Yes", I think they are not yet ready for any real life...

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)

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