Make container shrink-to-fit child elements as they wrap

ghz 1years ago ⋅ 2741 views

Question

I'm trying to figure out how flexbox works (supposed to work?…) for cases like below:

.holder {
  width: 500px;
  background: lightgray;
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: row;
  justify-content: space-between;
  flex-wrap: nowrap;
}
.v2 {
  width: 320px;
}
.child {
  display: inline-block;
  border: 1px solid black;
  padding: 30px 0px;
  text-align: center;
}


<div class="holder">
  <div class="child">At a glance</div>
  <div class="child">After coverage ends</div>
  <div class="child">Forms &amp; documents</div>
</div>
<br>
<br>
<div class="holder v2">
  <div class="child">At a glance</div>
  <div class="child">After coverage ends</div>
  <div class="child">Forms &amp; documents</div>
</div>
<br>
<br>
<div class="holder v2">
  <div class="child">At a
    <br>glance</div>
  <div class="child">After coverage
    <br>ends</div>
  <div class="child">Forms &amp;
    <br>documents</div>
</div>

JSFiddle here

The problem is that when there's enough space to fit elements, I'm getting a nice tight-fitted children, with even spacing between. (first, top div block)

However, when there's no enough space and text inside children starts wrapping, it all kinda goes in a weird direction - children are not tightly fit anymore, and even though after wrapping, there's enough space around flex children, because there are not properly fit anymore, space-around doesn't really have a chance to work as well (second div block)

However still, IF I add manual line breaks at places where the automatic line breaks occur, everything gets laid out as it "should"… (bottom, third block)

What I'd like is to always have children tightly fitted within their boxes (black borders), and whatever space is left, would be distributed evenly between them, without me having to add manual line breaks (which is not an option in my case)

Is it possible at all?…

Answer

In CSS, the parent container doesn't know when its children wrap. Hence, it continues scaling its size oblivious to what's going on inside.

Put another way, the browser renders the container on the initial cascade. It doesn't reflow the document when a child wraps.

That's why the container doesn't shrink-wrap the narrower layout. It just continues on as if nothing wrapped, as evidenced by the reserved space on the right.

The maximum length of the horizontal white space is the length of the element(s) that the container was expecting to be there.

In the following demo, whitespace can be seen coming and going as the window is re-sized horizontally: DEMO

You'll need a JavaScript solution (see here and here)... or CSS media queries (see here).

When dealing with wrapping text, text-align: right on the container may be helpful in some cases.

#html