scalable circels connected by line - css

Question

i want to make circles connected by a line in CSS. I have achieved that thanks to an answer here at Stackoverflow. But I want to scale the circles to twice their size on hover. But when I am doing so, the line before the circle is also getting scaled.
Given below is my styling
li {
width: 2em;
height: 2em;
text-align: center;
line-height: 2em;
border-radius: 1em;
background: dodgerblue;
margin: 0 1em;
display: inline-block;
color: white;
position: relative;
}
li:hover {
transform: scale(3);
}
li::before {
content: '';
position: absolute;
top: .9em;
left: -4em;
width: 4em;
height: .2em;
background: red;
z-index: -1;
}
li:first-child::before {
display: none;
}
.active {
background: dodgerblue;
}
.active~li {
background: lightblue;
}
.active~li::before {
background: lightblue;
}
<ul>
<li>1</li>
<li>2</li>
<li>3</li>
<li>4</li>
<li>5</li>
<li>6</li>
<li>7</li>
</ul>

Answer 1

When you use ::before on an element (here li), the dynamically added content will become the first child of that element. Hence, when you apply a scale to your lis, the scaling will also apply to the line added with ::before.
Solution: Wrap the numbers in another element, for example a span, then scale the span instead of the li. This way, the line will not be affected anymore.
li {
display: inline-block;
position: relative;
margin: 0 1em;
}
li span {
display: inline-block;
position: relative;
width: 2em;
height: 2em;
text-align: center;
line-height: 2em;
color: white;
background: dodgerblue;
border-radius: 1em;
}
li span:hover {
transform: scale(3);
}
li::before {
content: '';
position: absolute;
top: .9em;
left: -4em;
width: 4em;
height: .2em;
background: red;
z-index: -1;
}
li:first-child::before {
display: none;
}
<ul>
<li><span>1</span></li>
<li><span>2</span></li>
<li><span>3</span></li>
<li><span>4</span></li>
<li><span>5</span></li>
<li><span>6</span></li>
<li><span>7</span></li>
</ul>
Alternatively, if you can't or don't want to use additional markup, you could also make use of li:hover::before in addition to li::before in order to create a properly sized and positioned line for the hovered circles. However, I would recommend against the use of transform in that case and instead just overwrite the lis width, height and border-radius properties instead.