Textarea resizing is a helpful UX feature when users are looking to post significant-sized content. As a general rule, you should allow resizing unless there is a specific reason or need to do so to accommodate your design.
When an element is resizeable, it has a little UI handle on a lower corner. The handle appears on the right on page elements when the page’s direction
is set to ltr
(left-to-right), and on the left on rtl
(right-to-left) pages.
The CSS3 resize
property controls if and how the user can resize an element by clicking and dragging the bottom right corner (on left-to-right page direction
) of the element.
There are four allowable values for the resize property that are pretty self-explanatory:
none
: the textarea is not resizeable.both
: The user can resize both the textarea height and width.vertical
: The user can resize the textarea height.horizontal
: The user can resize the textarea width.
Instead of completely disabling resizing, it's often better practice to constrain the amount of resizing a user can do with the max-height
, max-width
, min-height
, and min-width
CSS properties.