The markup is just your standard nested UL, but note that I have only used one class in the HTML, on the root
. After entry of CSS higher version, it became possible to create similar effects using standard HTML technologies, a significant number of people who have difficulty with hand control or eye blindness can use a keyboard or other text device for accessing drop down menu. This tutorial covers the basics knowledge of CSS menus. I've used WordPress since day one all the way up to v17, Looking at the previous screenshot, you can see that there is a page named Level 1. Great & Smart work. I’m specifically trying to duplicate the way the horizontal subnav functions. I haven’t personally tested in Chrome, but in Firefox, it disappears at a certain point. I hold B.Tech. Sure, it’s clever and awesome CSS, but realistically, a lot of future maintainers won’t fully understand it. Ray will explain. These days I find making websites a balancing act between keeping my markup clean and keeping my CSS clean. I have had people come to me with only access to or knowledge of CSS, but not the actual CMS template; in which case this could be a lifesaver, for example. For this example, I used the :before pseudo element off the anchor element to draw the arrows. CodePen is a place to experiment, debug, and show off your HTML, CSS, and In my experience, understanding ideas like this is useful in day to day CSS-foo. I’m probably the biggest markup purest out there right now and I’ve been abusing nth-child like a madman for years, but I’m finally starting to turn a corner with it. $(‘.nav’).find(‘li’).has(‘ul’).addClass(‘parent’); I just wanted it to work as if the item just knew it had a sub menu or not. I’ve heard another person complain about this as well but haven’t been able to replicate it. That’s it. Clever, clever… I think everything would be so much easier with a “parent” selector. I suppose I was being ‘old school. That is, create faux links: style s that’s are direct children of the - to indicate that there are more links that follow and, by contrast, style anchor tags as not having additional sub items. a decision I'm very happy with. We will be adding a few sub menu items to it. I also A clever solution…but again is it over automation…I am willing to bet that most CMS’s could be configured to output a class on a parent nav element that contains sub nav elements…saving a lot complex CSS wizardry…, Also using hover on the “li” element is not as accessible as using it on the “a” element…as you can have a “focus” state on an “a” element that matches the “hover” state…this is helpful for keyboard users who tab around your web site…Someone correct me if I am wrong but you can not focus into an “li” element…, Navigation elements should navigable both with a mouse and a keyboard…also touch has to be considered now as well…, This is exactly what I was thinking when I read: “Another way, assuming that upper level items are not coded as links, is to use that difference in tags as leverage. The common way to address this issue, is to simply add a class to the
- s that contain
s (sub menus) so that we can style those items differently from those that do not contain sub navigation. The pseudo element is not necessary to the technique. CSS-Tricks is hosted by Flywheel, the best WordPress hosting in the I’m sorry it doesn’t live up to your elegance standards. I’ve re-installed Chrome and this works fine. How can i open a link under the same navigation bar? They have courses on all the most important front-end technologies, from React to CSS, from Vue to D3, and beyond with Node.js and Full Stack. They then use jQuery to add a class to whichever menu should be visible. You’re trading off clean markup for messy CSS. Also, I don’t see an issue in assigning classes to the - ‘s that contain dropdowns, you can add those classes with JavaScript if you want to keep the original markup clean, or if for whatever reason you can’t access the markup. Especially for big menus, this trick would remove a lot of “unnecessary” characters. When it (or its parent) is not being hovered, the
has the styling that indicates a dropdown element, when it’s being hovered, the dropdown displays normally. That is a very fair point. I’ve seen much crazier things go completely unchallenged here. Could you take a screencast of how it “doesn’t work”? -This does not work in the latest Chrome. I often use “opt-in” classes myself, but the idea of the CSS ‘reacting’ to the markup, especially when I have seen things like:, appealed to me. Think of it as 4 menus. Here is a quick example. I really like the way the arrows rotate 180 degrees when we navigate to the child menus. While clever, the CSS calculations can be tricky at times or the method may be entirely impossible to implement depending on what other techniques you have used to lay out your menu and/or position your submenus, or the overall effect you desired to achieve. leverage Jetpack for extra functionality and Local My div box will contain id of navigation. I like how each one is activated upon hover and stays displayed until you hover over another li and the subnav for that appears and stays displayed. It’s cleaner in that you don’t have to add “submenu” classes to your markup but, just as before, it still requires that you structure the content of your list manually or that your CMS can foretell which list items will contain other s as sub menus. Classes are abused (vertical divider code), nth-child is abused (above), but we need some nice, legible, middle ground to become the default, and I don’t think it’s ugly-ass OOCSS. business, with a local development tool to match. The key is having an expected child count (HTML element planned parenthood?). I’ve read a few comments about getting a parent selector – is this something that will happen? The following is a guest post by Ray Messina. In following script we will use a div tag, and - tags and create menu options. But if you know a little something about the HTML structure, you can use a combination of positional selectors to mimic it. I really like how the arrows switch up/down, very descriptive and visually helpful. CSS3 selectors do offer an amazing amount of control for targeting elements and I find it useful( depending on the situation, as always). Here is the whole thing in action at CodePen: As you probably guessed, you could also use other selector/selector combinations such as :only-child, :first-child:last-child, :first-child:not(:last-child) and the like. or "Tricks". It’s good usability because it reduces the number of clicks the user has to perform to navigate to different sections. In modern interactive web designing, drop down menus appear very frequently. Another way, assuming that upper level items are not coded as links, is to use that difference in tags as leverage. Its working working on IE 8 , any work around..? We can can achieve nearly the same thing with li a:first-child:nth-last-child(x) { }. Some general styling to bring in the sexy: That’s essentially the active ingredient of this technique. Many designers are satisfied with leaving as that. A navigation menu always requires Standard HTML as a basic tool for menu designing. At the time of writing, estimated global support for these selectors, as used, was roughly 87% which is not too bad. It will demonstrate the functionality by giving some examples on to play with different types of menus. Test this out yourself, add any number of nested lists at any level! More and more I find that I prefer to keep my CSS clean by using a few extra elements/classes in my markup. Whatever happened to bandwidth conservation? Figure 1: Above figure is simple menu with submenu created by div tag which contains four main menu and 16 submenu (4 submenu for each main menu) and we have used standard HTML as a baseline. I had come across other methods of automatically styling list items which contain other lists, but they employed absolute positioning and a pseudo element off the child
. Thanks ! This is a really clever hack, but adding a class really isn’t that tedious in a situation like this. You must be logged to download. Figure 2: Above figure is a simple menu item in horizontal way. There is sadly no such selector in CSS yet. By extension, drop down menus are merely nested s. I’m trying to duplicate that effect for an app I’m building as a way to reduce repetitive tasks for our users (some on IE8). These menus are hidden with CSS. As much as I love the first-child & nth-child, I often find I refactor ( if I can ) with actual classes to help with readability. JavaScript creations. We have seen three kinds of menus including submenus. That’s no good at all. I could have just as easily changed backgrounds on the anchor itself instead; you can make it do most anything you want once you have targeted the element. But I have found that :nth-child(x):nth-last-child(x) gives the most flexibility and serves as a built-in fallback (as it allows us to target the element directly, rather than by exclusion), and there is little cross browser support advantage gained by using the other selector/selector combinations. In Firefox at least, this is due to the “margin” values in the CSS, in other words you end up hovering over an empty space that is not part of the menu (:hover is no longer maintained). We will start menu designing by creating a container using a div box. /* margin-left:1px; replace this rule with the follwing */ Using pure CSS, one can style the upper level of a navigation menu any which way, and hide the sub levels so that they are revealed only when the visitor hovers on the appropriate area. I am Software Developer from India. It’s a clever way to select an element when it’s not alone. Finally, just to polish it off, some positioning and arrow styling CSS code. On the aesthetic side of this particular demo, this addresses the ‘dead area’ issue: Recently, I was working on a dropdown navigation bar and wanted to differentiate the menu items which contained sub menus from those that didn’t. Listed script will compile the idea of dropdown menu in horizontal way. Recently, I was working on a dropdown navigation bar and wanted to differentiate the menu items which contained sub menus from those that didn’t. Frontend Masters is the best place to get it. I just wanted it to work as if the item just knew it had a sub menu or not. In Firefox, if you flick your mouse down fast enough, the browser doesn’t have enough time to make it disappear completely and so the :hover state is maintained, and no issues. Sub of the Day™ Menu - Sub of the Day | SUBWAY.com - Nederland (Nederlands) Subway.com wil graag cookies op uw computer plaatsen zodat wij onze website nóg beter kunnen maken. You know that one of the most important parts of website is navigation menu, which is very decorative and interactive section of page. Remove the offending margin(s) and you shouldn’t have an issue. It’s working with what we have in the tool box. Everyone’s complaining about the relative maintainability of one line of css? Select pages that you want to use as sub menu item and add them to the menu area. Making the code easier to understand for other people working on the project is much more beneficial I believe. In certain ways it would be a good thing – such as in this example – in others it could be a pain if used irresponsibly. Inside menu created with add_menu_page() If you are attempting to add a submenu page to a menu page created via add_menu_page() the first submenu page will be a duplicate of the parent add_menu_page(). A better solution would be to alter the markup and add some classes to the various elements and thereby decouple the HTML and CSS from each other. Note: You can also check it out this article and learn how to create a Metro Style Menu. This is handy if your drop-down is simple and you can structure it specifically that way. I’m wondering if anyone has adapted this to use as a WordPress menu? They then have a menu for each item in the Primary Menu (so a Shop menu, My ATT menu, and Support menu). The “ul” element has a full width and each hyperlink in the list has a width of 7px. If you want a submenu page in this scenario, you should first create a duplicate of your add_menu_page() and then add your add_submenu_page(): Introducing JavaScript 6 - Arrow Functions, Introducing JavaScript 6 - Using the let keyword, Meeting Angular Seed - An application skeleton for AngularJS, Introduction to Kendo UI Web Applications, If you don't have a MrBool registration, click here to register (free). I applaud this technique. For instance, when you hover over ‘Shop’ in the orange menu, it opens the subnav with WIreless, Bundles, Digital TV, etc. Note that for me in Firefox 24.0 the dropdowns fail 3 out of 5 tries to hover over them. Click here to login, MrBool is totally free and you can help us to help the Developers Community around the world, Yes, I'd like to help the MrBool and the Developers Community before download, No, I'd like to download without make the donation. Sweet ! :-) Is there anyone here who’d be willing to give me a brief explanation of how the developers got the nav bar on this page https://www.att.com/olam/passthroughAction.myworld?actionType=Manage to function the way it does, in exchange for a promise of a free beverage or two of their choice some day? Also we have added some colors to make it interactive, Listing 2: Script of Horizontal Menu and Submenu. border-left: 1px solid #fff; Dropdowns are a common component of modern (and not so modern) web design. That's a good thing! Most likely it will be two elements: the anchor and the , though one can tweak this technique to work for any number or child elements, as long as you have a regular pattern. I got one more method that is to use the following Jquery I’ve gotta jump on the “why not use a class” bandwagon. I’ve done this before thinking that I was doing a good SEO practice that says that ‘s should be used for “real” links since they have very good SEO weight, to later realize I had completely killed the accessibility of the main nav items because visitors using their keyboard now cannot TAB through elements that are not ‘s. Uh, guys… “Targeting” is spelled with only 2 “T’s.”. Following listed script will display simple vertical menu with sub menu, which compile the basic idea of menu designing. The concept is about marking items with additional content w/o altering the HTML; potentially this technique be used in situations other than menus as well. Horizontal Menu: Following section contains the description of linear menu (horizontal menu). This tutorial will deal with menu designing in CSS. in Computer Science & Engineering. We will answer as soon as possible. This means visitors will either waste their time looking and get frustrated for doing so or miss areas of your site all together! In this example we will add Level 2a, 2b, and Level 3a, 3b pages. I wanted to be able to do this automatically, without relying on JavaScript or having to add classes to the markup. Using JavaScript for dropdowns (not necessarily for menus) is something we all here do all the time, I personally don’t think I’ll be doing a CSS-only dropdown any time soon, but this article is certainly my go to tut if I ever encounter such gnarly situation. Thanks in advance! CSS-Tricks* is created, written by, and maintained by Chris You might be aware of the jQuery .has method, which allows you to select an element if it has any of another selector as a descendant. Whether adding a class is easier is a valid point but as far as the CSS goes the technique is valid, informative, and instructional, and as far as I know never been used before for this situation. Correct, you can not focus non “a” elements – had a big piece of work to do on this recently. At the end of this tutorial you will be able to create interactive navigation menu. I’ll let Ryan elaborate on the Chrome issues he was experiencing. }. I only use pseudo classes when I am rapid prototyping a layout, or working in an environment when I can’t easily access the HTML. That is, create faux links…”. They have the Primary Menu (Shop, My ATT, Support). View the abundant options on the SUBWAY® menu and discover better-for-you meals! Does not work in FF 25 Beta, the dropdown vanishes immediately when I move the cursor (not matter what direction). Go through the examples given with this tutorial and let us know your queries at mrbool site. Good idea Ray, that’s an interesting technique. The sub-menu of the item in Resume pops up, but disappears when you try to hover over it. It can still happen though, as demonstrated here. However, I understand that not everyone has this luxury, and then this solution is probably fine. Really? Figure 1: Above figure is simple menu with submenu created by div tag which contains four main menu and 16 submenu (4 submenu for each main menu) and we have used standard HTML as a baseline. Where the “li” elements will be displayed as inline elements, this forces the list to be in one line. Simple, graceful and totally automatic; the way it ought to be. -This is not very elegant to look at code wise. Thank you Aaron Gustafson :). It’s a trick. Following section contains the description of linear menu (horizontal menu). Very neat and clean. .nav > li li:hover > ul { This section will explain the drop down menu or submenu in horizontal Menu. In this example we can remove bullets and the margins and padding from the list. Then when you hover over ‘myAT&T,’ it displays the items Overview, Bill & Payments, etc. That class then unhides that menu. Then you can use :afteror :before to add something on it or to customize in different mannor. I wanted to be able to do this automatically, without relying on JavaScript or having to add classes to the markup. I added a link to an item and it replaced current navigation bar with new page. If you have important information to share, please, retrofit a website with responsive design, https://www.att.com/olam/passthroughAction.myworld?actionType=Manage. In this example we can remove bullets and the margins and padding from the list. This is a very interesting way of accomplishing dropdowns (which we know have usability issues), but yet is something we can’t really fully live without, like our pal IE ><. Another option is to style the to indicate there is a dropdown present in this element. However, from a UX/UI point of view, this is lacking as it leaves the user having to explore the entire menu to find which sections contain additional navigation links. This is great life-saver if someone has to build a dropdown menu and cannot use JavaScript.