Scrollbars in a text box can be both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, they provide a way for users to navigate through large amounts of text that exceed the visible area. On the other hand, they can be distracting and take up valuable space on the page. In some cases, you may only want to show scrollbars in a text box when the text actually overflows. In this article, we will discuss how to achieve this using HTML tags formatting.
First, let's take a look at a basic text box with scrollbars enabled:
<textarea style="width: 300px; height: 100px; overflow: scroll;">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla consectetur libero nec magna faucibus, eget sodales lectus porttitor. Proin ac metus ut nunc fermentum ultricies. Sed eget lacus ut lectus elementum faucibus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Nam euismod varius urna, sit amet sollicitudin elit aliquet ac. Nam tincidunt lorem at vestibulum rutrum. Fusce vel velit id nisl fermentum eleifend. Praesent blandit, nulla nec gravida elementum, nunc dolor lobortis tellus, id commodo libero justo non ex. Mauris eu dolor et orci pulvinar pellentesque. Sed euismod, orci sed mollis finibus, lacus nisl ultricies urna, et laoreet nibh lacus vitae metus.</textarea>
As you can see, the scrollbars are always visible, even though the text does not overflow the visible area. To change this, we can use the "overflow" property in our CSS to control when the scrollbars appear.
The "overflow" property has four possible values: "visible", "hidden", "scroll", and "auto". By default, it is set to "visible", which means that the content will always be visible, regardless of the size of the container. In our case, we want to set it to "auto", which will only show the scrollbars when the content overflows.
Let's update our code to reflect this change:
<textarea style="width: 300px; height: 100px; overflow: auto;">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla consectetur libero nec magna faucibus, eget sodales lectus porttitor. Proin ac metus ut nunc fermentum ultricies. Sed eget lacus ut lectus elementum faucibus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Nam euismod varius urna, sit amet sollicitudin elit aliquet ac. Nam tincidunt lorem at vestibulum rutrum. Fusce vel velit id nisl fermentum eleifend. Praesent blandit, nulla nec gravida elementum, nunc dolor lobortis tellus, id commodo libero justo non ex. Mauris eu dolor et orci pulvinar pellentesque. Sed euismod, orci sed mollis finibus, lacus nisl ultricies urna, et laoreet nibh lacus vitae metus.</textarea>
Now, the scrollbars will only appear when the content exceeds the visible area of the text box. This not only saves space on the page, but also provides a cleaner and more user-friendly experience for the reader.
But what if you want to always show the scrollbars, even when the content does not overflow? This can be achieved by setting the "overflow" property to "scroll".
<textarea style="width: 300px; height: 100px; overflow: scroll;">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla consectetur libero nec magna faucibus, eget sodales lectus porttitor. Proin ac metus ut nunc fermentum ultricies. Sed eget lacus ut lectus elementum faucibus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Nam euismod varius urna, sit amet sollicitudin elit aliquet ac. Nam tincidunt lorem at vestibulum rutrum. Fusce vel velit id nisl fermentum eleifend. Praesent blandit, nulla nec gravida elementum, nunc dolor lobortis tellus, id commodo libero justo non ex. Mauris eu dolor et orci pulvinar pellentesque. Sed euismod, orci sed mollis finibus,
