Html – Understanding offsetWidth, clientWidth, scrollWidth and -Height, respectively

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There are several questions on StackOverflow regarding offsetWidth / clientWidth / scrollWidth (and -Height, respectively), but none give comprehensive explanation of what those values are.

Also, there are several sources on the web giving confusing or incorrect information.

Can you give a complete explanation including some visual hints?
Also, how can those values be used to calculate scroll bar widths?

Best Solution

The CSS box model is rather complicated, particularly when it comes to scrolling content. While the browser uses the values from your CSS to draw boxes, determining all the dimensions using JS is not straight-forward if you only have the CSS.

That's why each element has six DOM properties for your convenience: offsetWidth, offsetHeight, clientWidth, clientHeight, scrollWidth and scrollHeight. These are read-only attributes representing the current visual layout, and all of them are integers (thus possibly subject to rounding errors).

Let's go through them in detail:

offsetWidth, offsetHeight: The size of the visual box incuding all borders. Can be calculated by adding width/height and paddings and borders, if the element has display: block
clientWidth, clientHeight: The visual portion of the box content, not including borders or scroll bars , but includes padding . Can not be calculated directly from CSS, depends on the system's scroll bar size.
scrollWidth, scrollHeight: The size of all of the box's content, including the parts that are currently hidden outside the scrolling area. Can not be calculated directly from CSS, depends on the content.

Try it out: jsFiddle

Since offsetWidth takes the scroll bar width into account, we can use it to calculate the scroll bar width via the formula

scrollbarWidth = offsetWidth - clientWidth - getComputedStyle().borderLeftWidth - getComputedStyle().borderRightWidth

Unfortunately, we may get rounding errors, since offsetWidth and clientWidth are always integers, while the actual sizes may be fractional with zoom levels other than 1.

Note that this

scrollbarWidth = getComputedStyle().width + getComputedStyle().paddingLeft + getComputedStyle().paddingRight - clientWidth

does not work reliably in Chrome, since Chrome returns width with scrollbar already substracted. (Also, Chrome renders paddingBottom to the bottom of the scroll content, while other browsers don't)

Related Solutions

Html – Position an element relative to its container

You are right that CSS positioning is the way to go. Here's a quick run down:

position: relative will layout an element relative to itself. In other words, the elements is laid out in normal flow, then it is removed from normal flow and offset by whatever values you have specified (top, right, bottom, left). It's important to note that because it's removed from flow, other elements around it will not shift with it (use negative margins instead if you want this behaviour).

However, you're most likely interested in position: absolute which will position an element relative to a container. By default, the container is the browser window, but if a parent element either has position: relative or position: absolute set on it, then it will act as the parent for positioning coordinates for its children.

To demonstrate:

#container {
  position: relative;
  border: 1px solid red;
  height: 100px;
}

#box {
  position: absolute;
  top: 50px;
  left: 20px;
}

<div id="container">
  <div id="box">absolute</div>
</div>

In that example, the top left corner of #box would be 100px down and 50px left of the top left corner of #container. If #container did not have position: relative set, the coordinates of #box would be relative to the top left corner of the browser view port.

Javascript – How to retrieve an HTML element’s actual width and height

You should use the .offsetWidth and .offsetHeight properties. Note they belong to the element, not .style.

var width = document.getElementById('foo').offsetWidth;

Function .getBoundingClientRect() returns dimensions and location of element as floating-point numbers after performing CSS transforms.

> console.log(document.getElementById('id').getBoundingClientRect())
DOMRect {
    bottom: 177,
    height: 54.7,
    left: 278.5,
    right: 909.5,
    top: 122.3,
    width: 631,
    x: 278.5,
    y: 122.3,
}

Best Solution

Try it out: jsFiddle

Related Solutions

Html – Position an element relative to its container

Javascript – How to retrieve an HTML element’s actual width and height

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