I have a webpage on which I would like to scroll to a certain element.
That part works fine by using scrollIntoView; but I would like to add a bit of space above the element (20px or something)
I'm currently doing something like this:
const moveToBlue = () => { const blue = document.getElementById('blue') blue.scrollIntoView({ behavior: 'smooth', block: 'start', inline: 'start'}); }; I would however like to scroll futher 20px up (see my demo here)
Is this possible?
You can set scroll-margin CSS property on the scroll target element. For example
.blue { scroll-margin: 20px; } (or more specifically scroll-margin-top or scroll-margin-bottom)
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/scroll-margin
scroll-margin-top: 20px;
You can always use scrollTo by first getting the elements coordinates using getBoundingClientRect then adding the scroll offset and taking your scroll margin. e.g.
const moveToBlue = () => { const blue = document.getElementById('blue'); let position = blue.getBoundingClientRect(); // scrolls to 20px above element window.scrollTo(position.left, position.top + window.scrollY - 20); }; 
scrollIntoView + scrollMarginTop but for some reason it didn't apply the margin to the first item in my list. Still not sure why, but using this method works for all cases.That helped in my case —
HTML
<div class='stick-to-top'></> Javascript
document.getElementsByClassName('stick-to-top')[0].scrollIntoView({behavior: "smooth", block: "center"}); CSS
.stick-to-top { padding-bottom: 400px; } In general it's not very straightforward (if we want behavior: smooth), and will require messing with javascript in one way or another. For example you could use window.scrollTo and calculate necessary top position manually.
In some cases however you could visually achieve necessary effect by using CSS smartly. In your demo you can use padding-top instead of margin and wrap content of the block into additional helper container.
Another potential solution is to scroll not the the element itself, but to one of its previous siblings. Example:
let elementToScrollTo = <yourTargetElement>; const childOffset = 3; for (let i = 0; i < childOffset; i++) { if (!elementToScrollTo.previousElementSibling) { break; } elementToScrollTo = elementToScrollTo.previousElementSibling; } elementToScrollTo.scrollIntoView(); 