Position sticky on thead

As you might know, position: sticky; has landed in Webkit (demo). So far I can see this only works within the parent element. But I'd like to know if I can use this in a scrolling div with a table.

So it needs to 'listen' on the scrolling event of the div, not the table.

I know I can do this with javascript and absolute positioning, but I was wondering if the sticky-positioning would support this.

Position sticky on thead th works in 2018!

In your stylesheets just add this one line:

thead th { position: sticky; top: 0; }

Your table will need to include thead and th for this to style.

<table>
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th>column 1</th>
            <th>column 2</th>
            <th>column 3</th>
            <th>column 4</th>            
        </tr>    
    </thead>
    <tbody>
      // your body code
    </tbody>
</table>

Also, if you have multiple rows in thead, you can select the first one to remain sticky:

thead tr:first-child th { position: sticky; top: 0; }

As of March 2018 support is pretty much there across modern browsers ref: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-sticky

Credit goes to @ctf0 for this one (ref comment made 3 Dec 2017)

If you need sticky header for chrome only then you can set position: sticky; top: some_value (top property is mandatory) for td element in a thead element.

See:

<table border=1>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <td style='position: sticky; top: -1px;background: red'>Sticky Column</td>
      <td>Simple column</td>
    </tr>
  </thead>

table with a stiky header

position: sticky doesn't work with table elements (as long as their display attribute starts with table-) since tables are not part of specification:

>Other kinds of layout, such as tables, "floating" boxes, ruby annotations, grid layouts, columns and basic handling of normal "flow" content, are described in other modules.

---

Edit: As Jul 2019 according to https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-sticky Firefox supports this feature and Chrome has at least support for <th> tag.

As it turns out it position: sticky only works in the window and not in a scrolling div.

I created a test-case with a very long table with a table header:

h1 {
  font-size: 18px;
  font-weight: bold;
  margin: 10px 0;
}

div.testTable {
  height: 200px;
  overflow: auto;
}

table.stickyHead thead {
  position: -webkit-sticky;
  top: 0px;
  background: grey;
}

table.stickyHead td,
table.stickyHead th {
  padding: 2px 3px;
}

<h1>Position sticky</h1>
<div class="testTable">
  <table class="stickyHead">
    <thead>
      <tr>
        <th>column 1</th>
        <th>column 2</th>
        <th>column 3</th>
        <th>column 4</th>
      </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
        <td>4</td>
      </tr>
    </tbody>
  </table>
</div>

As you can see, if you remove the overflow from the wrapper and make your window not so tall, the table-head is sticking to the top of the window. I doesn't apply to the wrapping div even if you make give the div position: relative

Caution:

posotion:sticiky doesnt work anymore on Google Chrome in 2019, try to use fixed instead or display:inline-block