Add scroll margin to all elements which can be targeted

Published on by Andy Bell

We can add an extra bit of space to targeted elements, thanks to modern CSS!

You can target an element with HTML by giving it an id then in the URL bar, adding a reference to that id, prefixed with a #, like so:

html
<h2 id="my-lovely-heading">Hello</h2>
text
https://example.com/#my-lovely-heading

With this set up, the browser will automatically scroll the user to that targeted element. It’s why you often find this pattern in long-form writing, such as on this site. What’s been problematic in the past though, is that targeted element will be flush to the top of the viewport when the browser has finished scrolling—not ideal.

Luckily, CSS has our back with scroll-margin-top. A pro tip is to add this to all elements with an id in your project.

css
[id] {
  scroll-margin-top: 2ex;
}

The extra fancy part is by using 2ex, we use the x-height of the chosen font and its size, twice. Handy! You can read more about these sort of units, here.

An extra bonus pro tip is to style the targeted element with the :target pseudo-class and use some native smooth scrolling, just like I did in the below demo 👇