Test your skills: Overflow

The aim of these tasks is to help you check your understanding of overflow in CSS.

Note: You can try out solutions in the interactive editors below, however, it may be helpful to download the code and use an online tool such as CodePen, jsFiddle, or Glitch to work on the tasks.

If you get stuck, then ask us for help — see the Assessment or further help section at the bottom of this page.

Task One

The content is overflowing the box because it has a fixed height. Keep the height but cause the box to have scrollbars only if there is enough text to cause an overflow. Test by removing some of the text from the HTML, that if there is only a small amount of text that does not overflow, no scrollbar appears.

A small box with a border and a vertical scrollbar.

Try updating the live code below to recreate the finished example:

For assessment or further work purposes, download the starting point for this task to work in your own editor or in an online editor.

Task Two

In this task an image is in the box, it is bigger than the dimensions of the box so overflows visibly. Change it so that any image outside of the box is hidden.

A box with an image which fills the box but does not spill out the edges.

Try updating the live code below to recreate the example as displayed in the image:

For assessment or further work purposes, download the starting point for this task to work in your own editor or in an online editor.

Assessment or further help

You can practice these examples in the Interactive Editors mentioned above.

If you would like your work assessed, or are stuck and want to ask for help:

  1. Put your work into an online shareable editor such as CodePen, jsFiddle, or Glitch. You can write the code yourself, or use the starting point files linked to in the above sections.
  2. Write a post asking for assessment and/or help at the MDN Discourse forum Learning category. Your post should include:
    • A descriptive title such as "Assessment wanted for Overflow skill test 1".
    • Details of what you have already tried, and what you would like us to do, e.g. if you are stuck and need help, or want an assessment.
    • A link to the example you want to be assessed or need help with, in an online shareable editor (as mentioned in step 1 above). This is a good practice to get into — it's very hard to help someone with a coding problem if you can't see their code.
    • A link to the actual task or assessment page, so we can find the question you want help with.