scroll-margin-inline

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2019.

The scroll-margin-inline shorthand property sets the scroll margins of an element in the inline dimension.

Try it

Constituent properties

This property is a shorthand for the following CSS properties:

Syntax

css
/* <length> values */
scroll-margin-inline: 10px;
scroll-margin-inline: 1em 0.5em;

/* Global values */
scroll-margin-inline: inherit;
scroll-margin-inline: initial;
scroll-margin-inline: revert;
scroll-margin-inline: revert-layer;
scroll-margin-inline: unset;

Values

<length>

An outset from the corresponding edge of the scroll container.

Description

The scroll-margin values represent outsets defining the scroll snap area that is used for snapping this box to the snapport. The scroll snap area is determined by taking the transformed border box, finding its rectangular bounding box (axis-aligned in the scroll container's coordinate space), then adding the specified outsets.

Formal definition

Initial valueas each of the properties of the shorthand:
Applies toall elements
Inheritedno
Computed valueas each of the properties of the shorthand:
Animation typeby computed value type

Formal syntax

scroll-margin-inline = 
<length>{1,2}

Examples

Simple demonstration

This example implements something very similar to the interactive example above, except that here we'll explain to you how it's implemented.

The aim here is to create four horizontally-scrolling blocks, the second and third of which snap into place, near but not quite at the right of each block.

HTML

The HTML that represents the blocks is very simple:

html
<div class="scroller">
  <div>1</div>
  <div>2</div>
  <div>3</div>
  <div>4</div>
</div>

CSS

Let's walk through the CSS. The outer container is styled like this:

css
.scroller {
  text-align: left;
  width: 250px;
  height: 250px;
  overflow-x: scroll;
  display: flex;
  box-sizing: border-box;
  border: 1px solid #000;
  scroll-snap-type: x mandatory;
}

The main parts relevant to the scroll snapping are overflow-x: scroll, which makes sure the contents will scroll and not be hidden, and scroll-snap-type: x mandatory, which dictates that scroll snapping must occur along the horizontal axis, and the scrolling will always come to rest on a snap point.

The child elements are styled as follows:

css
.scroller > div {
  flex: 0 0 250px;
  width: 250px;
  background-color: #663399;
  color: #fff;
  font-size: 30px;
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
  justify-content: center;
  scroll-snap-align: end;
}

.scroller > div:nth-child(2n) {
  background-color: #fff;
  color: #663399;
}

The most relevant part here is scroll-snap-align: end, which specifies that the right-hand edges (the "ends" along the x axis, in our case) are the designated snap points.

Last of all we specify the scroll margin values, a different one for the second and third child elements:

css
.scroller > div:nth-child(2) {
  scroll-margin-inline: 1rem;
}

.scroller > div:nth-child(3) {
  scroll-margin-inline: 2rem;
}

This means that when scrolling past the middle child elements, the scrolling will snap to 1rem outside the inline end edge of the second <div>, and 2rems outside the inline end edge of the third <div>.

Note: Here we are setting scroll-margin on the start and end of the inline axis (x in our case), but only the end edge is really relevant. It would work just as well here to only set a scroll margin on that one edge, for example with scroll-margin-inline: 0 1rem, or scroll-margin-inline-end: 1rem.

Result

Try it for yourself:

Specifications

Specification
CSS Scroll Snap Module Level 1
# propdef-scroll-margin-inline

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also