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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T11:20:05+00:00

I need to get absolute coordinates (left and top relative to beginning of document)

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I need to get absolute coordinates (left and top relative to beginning of document) of any DOM element inspected by Firebug regardless depth of DOM tree. Is there such a plugin?

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  1. Editorial Team

    You don’t need a plugin in fact, just a chunk of JavaScript + knowledge of some Firebug internals.

    You can find in this article how to get absolute coords of a DOM element. Each DOM element has properties .offsetLeft .offsetTop .offsetParent that define the position regarding some other DOM element (the offsetParent). The element on the top of hierarchy has a offsetParent = null. You can traverse the elements and its offsetParents up the hierarchy to find the absolute coords, given an element.

    The code copied from that page:

    var findpos = function findPos(obj) {
   var curleft = curtop = 0;
   if (obj.offsetParent) {
      do {
      curleft += obj.offsetLeft;
      curtop += obj.offsetTop;
      } while (obj = obj.offsetParent);
      return [curleft,curtop];
   }
}

    (paste it in Firebug, and then you have a findpos function available in the console).

    For majority of simplest cases, you will have offsetParent = <body> which has zero offsets (like in the screenshots) so you don’t need to add anything to offsetLeft and offsetTop. However if relative positionings take place, then you must traverse the parents.

    When you select an element in Firebug, then it’s available as $0 in Firebug console.

    So, after mixing the two things, you can issue the commands like in the screenshot:

    Firebug - finding absolute coords of a node

    to easily get absolute coords of any element.

    The script I’ve pasted above should work in the huge majority of occasions. You may want to read this post also for a bit more robust function.

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