box-decoration-break helps to define how elements should be rendered across lines

Previously, I needed to style link elements in a pretty or fancy way.

Unfortunately, visual effects were often trickier to implement than expected because links can be broken across several lines. This line break then messed up the styling.

For example, padding and border-radius were only applied to an element's beginning and end. And this behavior is not always what you want if your element spans across several lines.

Today I learned that box-decoration-break defines how elements are rendered across pages, columns, and lines. It accepts two values: clone (the default value) and slice.

clone leads to "cut off" styles. In contrast, slice changes the rendering so every element fragment (an element spread across two lines includes two fragments) is rendered independently. Styles like padding are applied several times to all the element fragments. 🎉

box-decoration-break doesn't work for all CSS properties, though. The following properties are rendered independently:

• background
• border
• border-image
• box-shadow
• clip-path
• margin
• padding

What the browser support?

MDN Compat Data (source)

Browser support info for box-decoration-break

22	22	79	32	32	7	7	1.5	22

It's pretty green, so box-decoration-break is a welcome help when dealing with fancy styles across lines and columns. 🎉

If you want to play around with it, look at this CodePen example or check the excellent MDN docs for box-decoration-break. Have fun!