It’s typically one of the first things you learn in CSS. The 'left' rule reduces the available width for the element by 50%. If you’re a CSS ninja who can code a website blindfolded, this article probably isn’t for you. Here’s the code to pull it off:There are a few things that you need to notice here. You should now be completely confident in your ability to tackle almost any centering situation with CSS, from dead centering a div to vertically centering a line of text within its container and beyond. We use cookies to improve user experience, and analyze website traffic. This means that we’ll need another way to center the child that isn’t dependent on the width of the parent.To accomplish this, we need to use a percentage for the Using this logic, we apply a left margin of negative fifty pixels along with a left value of 50% and our div is once again perfectly centered on the x-axis. To accomplish this, I used a bit of CSS shorthand. The Div.datatables_wrapper css does keep the buttons, header and body aligned but not the pagination. However, the default width for most block level elements is auto, which fills the available area on screen. We center the content with the vertical-align property.. These are shown below:We accomplish this movement through the use of the As an alternative, we can use the shorthand syntax for this. This centered everything nicely horizontally, but it didn’t have any effect on the vertical position. The trick here is that we need the div to stay in the center of the window, no matter what the window’s size is currently. The lack of good ways to vertically center elements in CSS has been a dark blemish on its reputation for pretty much its entire existence. We’ll start with a simple h1 element inside of a container div. The 'margin-right: -50%' is needed to compensate the 'left: 50%'. In this case, the first slot will apply to the top and bottom margins while the second slot will apply to the left and right margins. But now let’s say we want to center this line of text vertically as well. Here’s how this works:As you can see, applying a single line of CSS tossed our box straight to the center of its parent, which in this case is the body.
If you have two links, use 50%, and 33.33% for three links, etc.. text-align: center; /* If you want the text to be centered */ In this example, I am using Bootstrap’s width utility class of .w-50 to make the div 50% wide all the time. Example of vertically aligning a text with the CSS display property:¶ To position the text in the center, we must “move” it -50% left and 50% up by setting Using the floater div method requires to have an empty
, which is floated.To learn how to create flexible layouts optimized for multiple devices, read our If the content exceeds the container, it will visually disappear.Remember to have an empty
and set the height of the child element.Discuss the topic above on StackDev and get paid for that! As you can see, the default place for an image to appear if no repeat is set is the top left. This means that we’ll need another way to center the child that isn’t dependent on the width of the parent. The obvious answer is to use 50%, but that won’t really work because you’re not accounting for the width … Join our 30,000+ members to receive our newsletter and submit your design work.We'll use your email address to send one newsletter every week, and occasional promotions from us and our partners. As an example, let’s throw a paragraph inside of a div, then attempt to center that paragraph in the space.As you can see, I have auto margins set both on the paragraph and its parent div. Using the absolute and relative positioning methods we learned Here we see that on an absolutely positioned item contained inside of a relatively positioned item, we need to set the Let’s see if we can center the black box horizontally. Just being centred places it in the same position as left alignment. Recently, we took a dive into the very core concepts behind CSS layout and explored the differences between There are a bunch of different types of web elements and layout situations, each calling for a unique solution for centering (both vertically and horizontally). If this were a paragraph, we would probably take the methods above into account, but since it’s only a single line, we can use a nifty trick. The last thing that we’re going to learn to center is a CSS background image. Here’s another look at our centered div, this time with the margins declared using three separate but perfectly equivalent methods. However, it requires a fixed height container.When setting the padding, use % to help them grow dynamically. Today we’ll go over a bunch of these scenarios so you can wrap your mind around how they work and come away with the confidence to center anything!Get unlimited downloads of 2 million+ design resources, themes, templates, photos, graphics and more.