šŸ The Reason Why CSS Inset Property Was Not Called Position

Tom Smykowski
4 min readMar 5, 2023

Yesterday, Mohamed Saleh shared a nice illustration in LinkedIn about a useful CSS property:

The property is called inset and is a shorthand for top, right, bottom, left.

Now, you need some introduction. I am a design developer and for countless years am working with implementing designs in Vue, React, Angular, Ember and so on.

It means I not only know CSS, I love it. CSS is the best solution for the design you can possibly imagine given that design implementation is not easy.

It also means I am tracking CSS development and am quite familiar with all the new shenenigans. But for last couple of weeks I couldnā€™t recall inset until seeing Mohamedā€™s post.

Read to the end for a bonus!

CSS is great. But it made me wonder (for heaven sakes!), why W3C didnā€™t call this property positionĀ šŸ˜†ā€¦

You may wonder to, and you may also struggle with remember all of the CSS properties. Let us all try to remember inset with this article.

How To Remember CSS Inset Is A Position?

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Tom Smykowski

Software Engineer & Tech Editor. Top 2% on StackOverflow, 3mil views on Quora. Won Shattered Pixel Dungeon.