Breaking the Grid

Avatar of Geoff Graham
Geoff Graham on

UGURUS offers elite coaching and mentorship for agency owners looking to grow. Start with the free Agency Accelerator today.

If you thought CSS Grid solves issues where overflowed content escaping the confines of a horizontal layout, then think again. Dave Rupert writes up two ways he unintentionally broke outside the grid and how he wrangled things back into place.

As a Front-End developer nothing bothers me more than seeing an unexpected horizontal scrollbar on a website. While building out a checkout layout with CSS Grid I was surprised to find something mysterious was breaking the container. I thought Grid sort of auto-solved sizing.

Eventually I found two ways to break CSS Grid. As it would happen, I was doing both in the same layout.

Turns out these special cases boil down to:

  • Using overflow-x on an grid element
  • Using grid on form controls (or, more specifically, replaced elements)

Dave’s solution is a set of CSS rules affectionately named Fit Grid, which is a helper class that effectively removes and replaces the automated min-width: auto property assigned to grid items. This is a super helpful resource, though he admits it toes the line of “Clearfix 2.0” territory.

Direct Link →