This article has nothing to do with browser widths and viewport media queries.
In this article, we will be talking about the resize css property.
This is one property I only came across recently, because when do you actually need the user to resize something other than a textarea box.
In my article demonstrating how the HTML <wbr> tag works, I used the resize property to showcase when the words would break.
You might find yourself in need of this one-day, so here we go, an example of how the CSS resize property works and what options it has.
The end result will look like the following GIF.
CSS resize property
To add the option we can use the following syntax:
div {
resize: {value}
}
Where the value can be one of these:
-
none: Default, user cannot resize the element -
both: Resize horizontal and vertical -
horizontal: Only resize horizontally -
vertical: Only resize vertically -
initial: Reset back to the initial value -
inherit: Inherit value from the parent element
To make them effective, let's create some examples:
What's really important to know is that by default, the resize code will not do anything.
This is because the default overflow value is visible, and that will disable the resize.
We can use any of these overflow values: scroll, auto, hidden.
First let's define a basic box to start with:
div {
width: 100px;
height: 100px;
overflow: auto;
}
Now let's make a pink box that can resize both ways:
div.both {
resize: both;
background: #ef476f;
}
Perhaps we only want a horizontal resize? Check out the yellow box.
div.horizontal {
resize: horizontal;
background: #ffd166;
}
Over even just vertical, check out the green box
div.vertical {
resize: vertical;
background: #06d6a0;
}
You can see these boxes in action on the following Codepen.
CSS Removing resize attribute
There is one case where perhaps you want to remove the resize attribute, and this is with textareas.
They come with a default resize property, and we can turn this off by using the following code:
textarea {
resize: none;
}
You can try this out on the following Codepen.
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Top comments (14)
Always fun to find the browser doing a potentially hard thing natively!
I will say it is a shame you can't set which corner the thingy shows on. I want to resize something up that's anchored to the bottom of the screen and the native behaviour for that is quite quite bad unfortunately.
it's possible I get resize event?
Not sure I understand the question correctly?
Never heard about this before, eye opener! Just like I also never heard about margin collapse until recently. CSS is such a beast, easy to learn, impossible to master.
You are very right about that, I still find properties or hacks I've never seen before
Yes it's incredible, CSS must be the single most complicated and vast topic in all of web dev.
I also believe that more and more can be done using only native browser APIs/capabilities - of course at the moment React is very dominant, but as browser capabilities become ever more powerful and standardized, we may reach a point where a framework (like React or Vue) isn't even needed anymore to build frontends, especially if Web Components become good enough.
Yes we've come a long way since the days of IE8 and "quirks mode" :-)
how to action to all div, not just border
That won't work with the resize property.
You will need some JavaScript for that
sure.
I've always set
resize: verticalto mytextareas to prevent them from breaking the site layout, but I didn't know you could do that on divs.Yeah, same would either turn it off or only vertical.
But can be useful on divs as well.
Does it only works on block level elements?
Is it possible to get resizability by dragging the sides of the divs like in the Leetcode interface?
Is there a way to make this with a vertical separator in between two divs? I can just click the separator and move the mouse and the left and right resizes accordingly?