I have a div inside another div that has borders on the right and

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Editorial Team

Asked: May 20, 20262026-05-20T10:24:10+00:00 2026-05-20T10:24:10+00:00

I have a div inside another div that has borders on the right and left to center it:

I want to change the inner div to absolute so that the outer div flows up behind it:

Now it’s not centered. Is there any way to fix that?

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Editorial Team · Answer 1 · 2026-05-20T10:24:10+00:00

You have two problems here:

You’re absolutely positioning an element but not providing top, bottom, left, or right, so it’s being left in its original position. Which would be fine, except…
…abolutely-positioned elements with percentage dimensions (width, height) are a percentage of their context parent‘s outer dimensions (in this case, the <body> element).

You can re-center the inner div by setting left: 0; on it, but it will still overlap the body’s borders. To fix that as well, the simplest method is probably to drop the width property in favor of setting both left and right to the width of the body’s borders. (This acts as a kind of “smart stretching” for absolutely-positioned elements.)

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