What is causing nested divs to generate a scrollbar?

I am struggling with a situation involving 3 layers of nested divs:

<div class="outer">
  <div class="inner"><div class="item"></div></div>
</div>

In this scenario, the .inner div is set to position absolute and each div has a 1px border:

.outer{
  width:50%;
  height:100px;
  border: 1px solid red;
  position:relative;
  overflow-x:hidden;
  box-sizing:border-box;
}
.inner{
  border:1px solid blue;
  height:100%;
  position: absolute;
  box-sizing: border-box;
}
.item{
  width:100px;
  height:100%;
  background-color:yellow;
  display: inline-block;
  border:1px solid green;
  box-sizing:border-box;
}

This setup causes a scroll bar to appear on the .outer div.

You can check out the code in action on CodePen

I'm unsure why this scroll bar appears and what needs to be adjusted to prevent it. Additionally, increasing the border width of the .inner div to 3px removes the scrollbar. What could be causing this behavior?

Answer №1

The reason why this issue is occurring is because the .item element has been set to display as an inline-block, making it susceptible to properties like line-height and vertical-align.

By default, inline-block elements are vertically aligned to the baseline, causing them to align with the base line of any adjacent text. It seems there might be a problem where the calculation doesn't consider the box-sizing property, resulting in the baseline being positioned 2 pixels lower due to the total 2-pixel border around the element.

If you prefer to maintain this display style for the element, a simple solution would be to adjust its vertical-align to top:

.item {
    ...
    vertical-align: top;
}

Check out this Codepen demo for reference.

Answer №2

One peculiar observation is that by removing overflow-x:hidden;, the scrollbar vanishes. This anomaly arises from the default behavior of overflow being set to visible. Therefore, without any alterations, no scrollbars will be evident, except when overflow-x is specified, thereby triggering overflow-y as auto instead of the usual visible.

If overflow is assigned with auto, the scrollbar will also manifest.

Conversely, .item is formatted as inline-block, resulting in a vertical spacing defined by line-height. To eliminate this space, changing .inner to line-height:0 will suffice, and adjusting it will accordingly modify the space.

Alternatively, restricting the space occupied by elements within .inner can be achieved by applying overflow:hidden on .inner

Answer №3

What is the reason behind using inline-block for the inner element? Changing it to block makes the scroll bar disappear:

.element{
  width:100px;
  height:100%;
  background-color:yellow;
  display: block;
  border:1px solid green;
  box-sizing:border-box;
}

Answer №4

The reason your height seems off is because you have a 1px border added to each div, which is affecting the overall height calculation. You can see a working example here: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/VvbNXp

To correct this issue, simply adjust the height of your .inner and .item classes to:

height:calc(100% - 1px);

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