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Flex Box: Prevent Children From Stretching

So, flex boxes are a glorious addition to CSS3 to make advanced layouts rapidly. No more crazy floats and nested divs and weird percentage values for columns! Just setup your orientation to horizontal and toss a box-flex: 1 in for kicks.

However, just a tip: In the course of working with flex boxes, you will find that if you given a parent container a flex value, the children can still stretch it out. For example, a long paragraph will push its parent wider and wider to accommodate unless you give it a static width (which kinda defeats the purpose of using flex boxes really).

A nifty trick, however, is if you give an element with a defined box-flex a width: 0px;, the sizing algorithm will ignore said element’s children when sizing the element.

Here’s an example of automatic vertical columns:

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<div id="wall">
    <div id="col1" class="column top">

        <div class="entry">
            Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam eget tristique velit. In ut ligula nibh, a pulvinar lorem. Nam sed elit eget tellus vestibulum
        </div>

    </div>
    <div id="col2" class="column bottom">

        <div class="entry">
            Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam eget tristique velit. In ut ligula nibh, a pulvinar lorem. Nam sed elit eget tellus vestibulum
        </div>

    </div>
    <div id="col3" class="column top"></div>
    <div id="col4" class="column bottom"></div>
</div>

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#wall {
    display: -webkit-box;
    -webkit-box-orient: horizontal;

    position: absolute !important;
    top:0;
    right:0;
    bottom:0;
    left:0;

    overflow: hidden;
}

#wall .column {
    display: -webkit-box;
    -webkit-box-sizing: border-box;

    -webkit-box-orient: vertical;

    -webkit-box-flex: 1;
    width:0px;

    border-right: 1px solid #333;
}