CSS box-decoration-break

The box-decoration-break property is one of the properties introduced in CSS3. It allows developers to specify what happens to an element when it is broken due to a page break or column break, or for inline elements, a line break.

More specifically, the box-decoration-break property allows developers to specify whether the box fragments are treated as broken fragments of one continuous box, or whether each fragment appears as its own box (i.e. each fragment maintains the border, padding, and other properties as though it's a stand alone box).

The box-decoration-break allows you to maintain various properties across any fragments.

Without the box-decoration-break property (or with its value set to slice), boxes are usually "sliced" whenever they encounter a break.

For example, imagine a <div> element within a multi-column layout. The element contains so much text, that it spans over many columns. And imagine that the div has padding and a border applied to it. When you view this div in a browser, you're disappointed to see that, when it breaks over to a new column, it is "sliced". The border and padding is removed on each fragment. In many cases, you might prefer these properties to be maintained across all fragments. This is where the box-decoration-break can come in handy. By using this property with a value of clone, you can maintain the borders, padding, drop shadows, border images, and border radius across page/column/line breaks.

Syntax

Possible Values

slice

This keyword specifies that the box will be "sliced" across it's many fragments (if any). In other words, the box fragments won't maintain the padding, border, box-shadow, border-radius, and border-image properties across each fragment. Also, any background or background-image is drawn once and each fragment shows a small piece of the background.

clone

The box-decoration-break (with a value of clone) allows you to maintain the padding, border, box-shadow, border-radius, and border-image properties within each fragment. It also allows any background to be drawn independently in each fragment of the element. A no-repeat background-image will be rendered once in each fragment of the element.

In addition, all CSS properties also accept the following CSS-wide keyword values as the sole component of their property value:

initial

Represents the value specified as the property's initial value.

inherit

Represents the computed value of the property on the element's parent.

unset

This value acts as either inherit or initial, depending on whether the property is inherited or not. In other words, it sets all properties to their parent value if they are inheritable or to their initial value if not inheritable.

Basic Property Information

Example Code

Basic CSS

Working Example within an HTML Document

CSS Specifications

• The box-decoration-break property is defined in CSS Fragmentation Module Level 4 (W3C Working Draft)

Browser Support

Browser support for CSS properties can vary, particularly for newer or experimental features. Check current browser compatibility before using a property in production, especially when supporting older browsers.

The following table provided by Caniuse.com shows the level of browser support for this feature.

Initial Value

CSS properties have an initial value that applies when the property has not been explicitly set. The initial value is different from the value inherited from a parent element and may vary between properties.

Inheritance

Some CSS properties inherit their computed value from their parent element by default, while others do not. The inherit, initial, unset, and revert keywords can also be used to control how a property gets its value.

Vendor Prefixes

Most modern CSS properties use the standard, unprefixed syntax. Vendor-prefixed properties such as -webkit- are mainly relevant to older browser versions or specific features and should only be used when required by your browser support targets.