Making a dotted grid with CSS

Question

I want the whole body to have a dotted grid

body {
  background-image: radial-gradient(black 1px, transparent 0);
  background-size: 40px 40px;
}

The problem is that I want to shift it so that a dot is placed at the point (0, 0), i.e. the top left corner of the body. So the whole structure should be shifted at -20px, -20px. Or probably there is a better solution?

Answer 1

Update

The following solution works, but only for a fixed background-size. See @Temani Afif's answer for a better solution.

Answer

You can use the background-position CSS property to do exactly what you were thinking.

body {
  background: white;
  background-image: radial-gradient(black 1px, transparent 0);
  background-size: 40px 40px;
  background-position: -19px -19px;
}

Answer 2

Here is another way in addition to changing the background-position that may work whataver the size is:

body {
  background-image: radial-gradient(circle at 1px 1px, black 1px, transparent 0);
  background-size: 40px 40px;
}

body {
  background-image: radial-gradient(circle at 1px 1px, black 1px, transparent 0);
  background-size: 50px 30px;
}

Basically the idea is to change the position of the dots inside the area defined by background-size to the top/left instead of shifting all the background