How to Stop Flex Items from Stretching Beyond Their Content?

Preventing Flex Items from Stretching

Flexbox offers an intuitive layout system, but it can sometimes lead to undesired behaviors, such as flex items stretching beyond their content. To address this issue, let's delve into the underlying principles and explore the optimal solution.

Understanding the Issue

In your example, the span element is stretching to occupy the entire height of the flex container, even though it only contains a small amount of text. This occurs because by default, flex items have the ability to stretch and shrink within their available space.

Solution

To prevent the span from stretching without affecting other flex items, you can employ the align-items property on the flex container. By setting it to flex-start, you instruct all flex items within that container to align themselves along the top edge. As a result, they will only occupy as much height as their content requires.

Here's the updated code:

div {
  align-items: flex-start;
  background: tan;
  display: flex;
  height: 200px;
}

span {
  background: red;
}

Additional Considerations

This solution applies to all flex items within the container. If you need to prevent stretching only for specific items, you can use the flex property with the flex-shrink value. By setting this value to 0, you can disable the shrinking ability for that particular flex item.

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