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
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

  • 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
    CSS Sprites

    The idea of CSS sprites is pretty genius. For those of you who don't know the idea of a sprite, a sprite is basically multiple graphics compiled into one image. The advantages of using sprites are: Fewer images for the browser to download, which means...

  • By
    Scrolling “Go To Top” Link Using Dojo

    One of the most popular code snippets of posted on my blog has been the scrolling "Go To Top" link snippet. The premise of the snippet is simple: once the user scrolls an element (usually the BODY element) past a given threshold, a "Go...

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!