Introduction
I often encounter the issue of x-axis overflow while grading students’ responsive design assignments. This problem may seem puzzling, but the solution is quite simple.
Content in responsive web pages flows like water, adapting to the browser’s size. When content exceeds the container, the x-axis appears. Therefore, the solution is to “find the elements exceeding the browser width.”
This is where most people get confused: “I know the problem, but I don’t know how to tackle it 🥺.”
Solution 1: Exclusion Method
Press the F12 key to open the browser’s developer tools, and use the “Select an element in the page” button in the top left corner to select elements one by one and delete them. Once you delete the element causing the overflow, the x-axis will naturally disappear, revealing which element broke the layout. It’s a brute-force method, but it works.
Solution 2: Outline Method
Since you just want to identify the broken element, you can add an outline around any element to help understand the page structure, then check which element is pushing against the right edge of the screen.
* { outline: 1px solid red;}Solution 3: Hiding Method
If you really don’t want to see the x-axis on the web page, you can set overflow-x: hidden on the html element.
Conclusion
Once you find the broken element, you can slowly inspect which CSS rule caused the issue. Common reasons for layout breaks include:
- Fixed width sizes (use
max-widthinstead ofwidthwhen appropriate) - Not realizing that
bordercounts towards the element’s actual size - Using animations
There are many potential issues, but the certainty is that if you are familiar with CSS, you can easily tackle these problems. It’s common to accidentally break layouts while coding web pages, but with experience, these layout issues will occur less frequently, as you’ll have learned to avoid the pitfalls!