Nowadays, I choose Tailwind CSS as my goto CSS toolkit.
And today, I'll show you how to center elements with Tailwind CSS quickly.
We'll be looking at two methods of centering with Tailwind.
There isn't a clear wrong or right between these two methods, but generally, grid should be used for the high-level layout and flex for details.
For our demo, we'll use the same structure so you can see the difference better.
1 Grid center using Tailwind CSS
We'll start by using grid to center an element perfectly within a page.
<div class="grid place-items-center h-screen">
Centered using Tailwind Grid
</div>
Can you believe this is all we need?
Let's explore what's going on.
-
grid: Gives the element a display: grid property -
place-items-center: Gives it the center value on the place-items property -
h-screen: Sets the 100vh (screen-height) as the height
This code will perfectly center the element on the page.
Looking for a CSS Grid centered version?
2 Flex center using Tailwind CSS
A second option is to use flex box to center the element.
The approach is pretty similar, but we have to specify the horizontal and vertical centering with flex box.
Let's see how that would look like:
<div class="flex justify-center items-center h-screen">
Centered using Tailwind Grid
</div>
As you can see, it looks similar to the grid option but with an extra variable.
-
flex: Adds the display: flex property -
justify-center: Does the horizontal center -
items-center: Does the vertical center -
h-screen: Sets the 100vh (screen-height) as the height
This will result in the following:
Looking for the CSS Flex center article?
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Top comments (6)
While this look correct, it's wrong to center text content this way: dev.to/afif/never-make-your-text-c... .. we should not do it like that
I'm styling a div, which is a block element, so not sure why that would be wrong to be honest with you.
Never had any issues with it, but this was more to demonstrate the purpose of how to align, not specific to center a text element.
here is trivial examples to show you what's wrong: jsfiddle.net/4fveh3kb/ .. jsfiddle.net/4fveh3kb/2/ (you can read the article I linked to understand what is happening).
A lot of people are suffering from the side effects of such centring method because most of the articles are showing the same code without really explaining what is happening behind the scenes so I wanted to hightlight that it's not correct to use the code that way when it comes to center text content.
Ok I understand, the issue is then people using P elements as blocks, that is indeed wrong, but in my example I'm not doing that, so was just confused as to why you said it's the wrong way.
I agree you should make a P element a grid of flex element.
But when you put it on the parent div container your example wouldn't happen.
mx-auto text-center
That would be specific for the text indeed,
This example is more for elements, but used the text to showcase it ✨