What is the purpose of this purple dashed line area?

Question

What does this purple area represent?

Underpainting

Looks like available space. What does the html and css wrapping the button look like? – Preraphaelite

Answer 1

It shows the available space where the element can be expanded.

Example:

This is an example with just one character. It is possible to see the dashed area after the text. It means that it is the area where the text can possibly be expanded.

Now let's add more characters in our example. It can be seen that the length of the purple dashed line area is decreased:

Code snippet

It is possible to run the following code snippet and open dev tools to see that purple dashed area:

*, html, body {
    box-sizing: border-box;
    margin: 0;
}

div {
    position: relative;
    background-color: lightgreen;
}

button {
  display: flex;
  width: 100px;
}

<div>
    <button>1</button>
</div>

Adios

It is a button element that is wrapped with "position: relative" div. and button has "display: flex" – Underpainting

@Underpainting yeah, it is available area where text of the button can be expanded. Please, see my updated answer – Adios

It took me a minute to figure out what was creating the "available space" here. As far as I can tell, it's space that's being generated by a fixed or minimum height/width of the element, and which the text contents aren't filling up completely (as opposed to any padding or margin pushing things out). – Repudiate

Is it only for text or is it for any element type? I believe it shows the remains space any element can be expanded to fill up. – Orwin

It is a good answer. Would like (if I wouldn't know nothing about flex) to get information that this is because of a flex item in a flex container. And this is a way to lay out your page. bocoup.com/blog/dive-into-flexbox – Pathogen

Answer 2

It is white space. For example you have a container with 100% of width and two divs inside, one of those with 50% and another width 40% of width, it means that there is 10% of space empty... this 10% would be shown in this purple dashed line area by the Google inspector.

Kinase

The term "white space" usually refers to space characters (space, tab etc.) --- in that sense, its usage in this answer is not accurate and can be misleading. – U

Answer 3

Just want to add this to the other answers: if you encounter this at the end of a table, check for empty cells. Empty cells might not be expanded to the full width, but still use the space assigned to them which leads to the purple area!

Emporium