How to make absolute positioned elements overlap their overflow hidden parent

Uncategorized 2 Minutes

I believe, every front-end developer encountered this situation, at least once. Let’s say you need to absolute position something… And then you try to move it in some direction, and boom it disappears… You forgot the parent was set to overflow:hidden and now your element is lost in the hidden infinite vacuum.

Well, usually it ends by putting the absolute element outside of the annoying overflow:hidden parent, and you grumbling about how CSS sucks and so on… Actually you’re quite right. CSS do sucks a lot, even CSS3, I mean … ok no troll here 🙂

Let me show you a neat trick.

But first, if you’re trying to mess with these absolute/relative properties you really should be aware of these few important rules:

  • An absolutely positioned element is actually positioned regarding a relative parent, or the nearest found relative parent, which means it bubbles up the DOM until it finds a relative context to apply the positioning.
  • If no relative parent is found it will then reach the highest possible « container », which is the browser window, aka the viewport (or the document maybe, or the window … ? hey you know what, I’m not a W3C expert ok!).
  • BTW, this is probably why they called it « re-la-tive », just sayin’ 😛
  • It works the same if the parent is set to absolute instead of relative (an absolute inside another absolute) the first absolute acts as the positioning context for the second absolute.

Anyway, here our main problem is that the relative parent is also the overflow:hidden one. Well, if we simply move the position rule to put it just one level above, then the problem will be solved. True. Isn’t that just magic? Actually no, it’s not magic.

And let me prove what I’m saying.

HTML

<div class="parent">
  <div class="child"></div>
</div>

CSS

.parent {
  position: relative;
  overflow: hidden;
}
.child {
  position: absolute; 
  top: -10px; 
  left: -5px;
}

Result

 

Indeed, we can actually see that the little blue square is partially hidden by its overflow hidden parent.

Now the solution

Now let’s add another parent and move the position:relative one level up (or, in your context, you could maybe simply use an existing upper parent).

HTML

<div class="grand-parent">
  <div class="parent">
    <div class="child"></div>
  </div>
</div>

CSS

.grand-parent {
  position: relative;
}
.parent {
  /*position: relative;*/
  overflow: hidden;
}
.child {
  position: absolute; 
  top: -10px; 
  left: -5px;
}

Result

 

Magic.

Ressources

Thierry Koblentz’s article explaining different techniques to « clear floats » AND showing this clever trick.
* The post itself
* The overflow hidden / absolute demo (which isn’t there anymore apparently…)

Published by jkneb

Published

46 thoughts on “How to make absolute positioned elements overlap their overflow hidden parent”

  4. This isn’t completely ridiculous – it has to do with the default positioning of the container being “static” not relative and how absolute position will jump up to the nearest relative.

    This is a good technique, however the downfall is that if the container is scrollable, the absolutely positioned item will not scroll with the container. It is essentially disconnected from it’s nearest parent element and is not affected by scrolling.

    If there’s a solution for that without JS, I hope I can find it!

    Reply

    1. i agree , i want it to be relative relative to the element ‘s parent (to move with it whenever a scrolling happens) .at the same time, i don’t want my absolutely positioned element to be restricted by the || overflow : hidden || of the grand parent
      did u find any solutions ?

      Reply

  5. Well, till the time it works its a perfect solution. Web indeed has many instances of ridiculous solutions 🙂 BTW @jkneb if one cannot simply comment or delete position: relative; property from parent element, would it be fine to override the same with position: initial; ?

    Reply

  7. Thank you a lot for your post. I was trying to find a solution for ages .
    I have a div that contains an iframe
    Now I replace it by:
    (position relative)
    (overflow hidden)
    (position absolute with width and hight and left:0px and top:110px)

    I solved the overflow hidden problem but now I can’t fix the div to the exacte position that I want . Left:0px and top:110px.
    Does anyone know how to fix it??
    Thanks again for your post you saved me! 🙂

    Reply

  9. Great post ! But what if the parent element has a fixed position. I’m facing this problem and can’t face it

    Reply

  10. Well this solution is not ridiculous. It is inproperly marked. Grand parent should be named parent and parent should be named first child and child should be named second child. They are all childs to the “grandparent”. Why do you ask? It’s because position obsolute makes the last div with positon: relative it’s parent. Hence why they are both childs.

    Reply
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  14. Great solution.

    Maybe below is useful for someone:
    What I’ve found was that it won’t work if you have any element in the stack with the css property of transform: translate3d(), this somehow breaks the behaviour and will result in that the overflow hidden is not being ignored by the absolute positioning of the child.

    Reply

      1. ” I’d find a way to simply get rid of that .liquid-container”
        Unfortunately I can’t remove the div. And if I would, there is the modal-body, also with overflow: hidden.

        I need a more overall solution. Somehow .bootstrap-datetimepicker-widget should be in a layer on top of the others.

  27. I need only outer part to display. Parent block should be transparent also, so that it can be used as like loader like element to display on something in the page.

    Reply

  29. sorry for my second post: it does not work with ios (12) properly, especially if you toggle something (hide/show) – any ideas?

    Reply

  30. aaand my third post: if your’e using “overflow: auto” combined with -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; – that’s making the issues… hmpf

    Reply

  31. If you want to understand the “magic”, try just replace `overflow: hidden` to `overflow: scroll` with content.
    On the first example you’ll see how the small square will follow the scroll.
    On the second, it’ll stick to the `.grand-parent` element.

    Reply

  35. Thank you for the solution. Works for me.
    Now the issue is when I am using scroller in parent/grandparent , its again get hidden. Any solution for that?

    Thanks.

    Reply
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  38. My issue: (fingers-crossed).. I’m creating a mega-meu and I want the mega menu to be positioned absolute in relation to the viewport and not the individual links the mega-menu is under. now that’s easy because I don’t make the parent relative but the body. But(!!) I also want a li::after element to appear under the li when I hover over it. So now I have to put a position:relative to the li elements! which makes the mega-menu break and position itself to the li element!
    Virtually impossible I guess to get my mega-menu to by-pass the li position of relative and position itself to it’s second parent which is the body.

    Reply

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