width Attribute | width Property

Sets or retrieves the width of the object.

What's New for Microsoft® Internet Explorer 6

When you use the !DOCTYPE declaration to specify standards-compliant mode, this property specifies only the distance between the left and right edges of the content box—that is, within the padding.

Syntax

HTML { width : sWidth }
Scripting object.style.width [ = sWidth ]

Possible Values

sWidth Variant that specifies or receives one of the following values.
auto Default. Default width of the object.
width Floating-point number, followed by an absolute units designator (cm, mm, in, pt, pc, or px) or a relative units designator (em or ex). For more information about the supported length units, see CSS Length Units.
percentage Integer, followed by a %. The value is a percentage of the width of the parent object, whether or not it is specified explicitly. Negative values are not allowed.
The property is read/write for all objects except the following, for which it is read-only: currentStyle. The property has a default value of auto. The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) attribute is not inherited.
Expressions can be used in place of the preceding value(s), as of Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5. For more information, see About Dynamic Properties.

Remarks

As of Internet Explorer 6, when you use the !DOCTYPE declaration to specify standards-compliant mode, this property specifies the distance between the left and right edges of the content box—that is, within the padding.
When the !DOCTYPE declaration does not specify standards-compliant mode, and with earlier versions of Internet Explorer, this property includes the object's content box, plus the values of the following properties: borderLeft, borderRight, paddingLeft, and paddingRight. Subtracting the sum of the values of these properties from the value of the width property equals the width of the parent object's content box.
To perform operations on the numeric value of this property, use pixelWidth or posWidth.
For more information about how to access the dimension and location of elements on the page through the Dynamic HTML (DHTML) Document Object Model (DOM), see Measuring Element Dimension and Location.

Examples

This example uses an inline style sheet to set the width of an image.The following examples use the width attribute and the width property to change the width of the object.
<DIV STYLE="position:absolute;top:10px;left:10px;width:1in">
. . . </DIV>
This feature requires Microsoft® Internet Explorer 4.0 or later. Click the following icon to install the latest version. Then reload this page to view the sample.
This example uses inline scripting to set the width of an image when an onclick event occurs.
<IMG SRC="sphere.jpg" onclick="this.style.width='1cm'"
ondblclick="this.style.width=''">
This feature requires Microsoft® Internet Explorer 4.0 or later. Click the following icon to install the latest version. Then reload this page to view the sample.

Standards Information

This property is defined in World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1 and is defined in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Level 1 (CSS1) .

Applies To

A, ACRONYM, ADDRESS, APPLET, B, BDO, BIG, BLOCKQUOTE, BUTTON, CAPTION, CENTER, CITE, CODE, currentStyle, CUSTOM, DD, DEL, DFN, DIR, DIV, DL, DT, EM, FIELDSET, FONT, FORM, hn, HR, I, INS, KBD, LABEL, LEGEND, LI, LISTING, MENU, NOBR, OL, OPTION, P, PLAINTEXT, PRE, Q, RT, RUBY, runtimeStyle, S, SAMP, SELECT, SMALL, SPAN, STRIKE, STRONG, style, SUB, SUP, TEXTAREA, TT, U, UL, VAR, XMP