What are `scrolling boxes`?

Question

In the CSS Positioned Layout Module Level 3 (Working draft) in chapter 6.2. Sticky positioning we have this definition: (Emphasis mine)

A stickily positioned box is positioned similarly to a relatively positioned box, but the offset is computed with reference to the nearest ancestor with a scrolling box, or the viewport if no ancestor has a scrolling box.

What are these scrolling boxes?

Further down the document there is an issue about the term scrolling boxes

Issue 6 Sticky positioning should really be defined in terms of the nearest scrollable ancestor, but there is currently no such term defined elsewhere in CSS. CSSOM View refers to "scrolling boxes." CSS Overflow has yet to pull in the relevant text from CSS Box, and CSS Box has an old, confusing definition of "flow root" which is almost (but probably not quite) what we want here. This spec refers to "flow root," since that’s the closest thing currently specced somewhere, but this is not optimal.

Does anybody know, where I can find further information (this draft is from May 2016)? I especially want to switch on or off, if a box is a scrolling box or not.

Answer 1

As @alex said a scrolling box is a box where the value of overflow is set to a value different from visible (the default one). I cannot confirm but I concluded this based on this previous answer where overflow is creating some issues with sticky element.

As I explained there, if you have an element with overflow:hidden as an ancestor of the position:sticky this one will stop working because its offset will be calculated based on that box (with overflow:hidden) because it's the nearest ancestor with a scrolling box. Since we used hidden we cannot scroll this box so we cannot see the sticky behavior.

Here is a basic example:

.wrapper {
  height:200vh;
  border:2px solid;
}
.wrapper >div {
  position:sticky;
  top:0;
  height:20px;
  background:red;
}

<div class="wrapper">
  <div></div>
</div>

In the below example, the viewport will be used for the reference because we have no scrolling box. Now let's add overflow to the wrapper:

.wrapper {
  height:200vh;
  border:2px solid;
  overflow:scroll;
}
.wrapper >div {
  position:sticky;
  top:0;
  height:20px;
  background:red;
}

<div class="wrapper">
  <div></div>
</div>

Now our sticky element will consider the wrapper for the reference but since we don't have any overflow, we won't have any scroll so there is no way to trigger the sticky behavior. Also scrolling the viewport will do nothing.

If you add some overflow by adding another element inside we can trigger the sticky behavior:

.wrapper {
  height:200vh;
  border:2px solid;
  overflow:scroll;
  position:relative;
}
.wrapper >div {
  position:sticky;
  top:0;
  height:20px;
  background:red;
}

.wrapper > span {
  position:absolute;
  top:100%;
  height:50px;
  left:0;
  right:0;
  background:blue;
}

<div class="wrapper">
  <div></div>
  <span></span>
</div>

We can clearly see how the scroll of the wrapper is controlling the sticky element and the scroll of the viewport is doing nothing thus we can conclude that our wrapper is the the nearest ancestor with a scrolling box

---

Considering the last issue in the specification we can also read that:

Sticky positioning should really be defined in terms of the nearest scrollable ancestor, but there is currently no such term defined elsewhere in CSS. CSSOM View refers to "scrolling boxes."

So probably a scrollable ancestor is the same as an ancestor with a scrolling box.