Preface: Experienced coder, VERY new to CSS.
I've designed a website that uses a wrapper and has a horizontal banner that I want to fill with links on the top (Like retail sites that have their categories listed along the top).
I've placed all the links in a toplink class, and I have set position:relative;. My goal was to position them using top: and left:, and then space them out by setting all of their padding-left's to a certain degree. It seems when I do that, however, the last 2 links always jumps off the wrapper and moves to the left of the whole wrapper.
Any better ideas on how to implement this? I don't need solutions necessarily, just some ideas on how to move in a better path.
Assuming some simple markup like this:
<ul id="nav">
<li>link 1</li>
<li>link 2</li>
<li>link 3</li>
<li>link 4</li>
<li>link 5</li>
</ul>
1) To space out links use text-align:justify with a pseudo element after it with 100% width
FIDDLE
(Resize browser window and also see what happens when you add/remove a list item from the markup)
CSS
#nav {
text-align: justify;
min-width: 500px;
}
#nav:after {
content: '';
display: inline-block;
width: 100%;
}
#nav li {
display: inline-block;
}
2) If you're looking for the links to expand/contract - you should use css tables for this
FIDDLE
(Resize browser window and also see what happens when you add/remove a list item from the markup)
CSS
#nav {
display:table;
table-layout: fixed;
width: 100%;
}
#nav li {
display: table-cell;
height: 25px;
background: beige;
border: 1px solid brown;
text-align: center;
}
Try getting rid of the position:relative and the top:0; left:0; stuff and use float:left on the anchors instead.
You don't position: relative or float: left to align them horizontally.
Anchors are inline elements so they'll align horizontally anyway. However, you could add some padding to visually separate them.
Related
Did a lot of research on all the separate components. However, I don't understand how the components work together. Several placement issues have plagued me on different occasions. I would like to understand why it behaves like it does.
Designing a site with a fixed header, containing some buttons. I want the buttons to be placed on a colored row (NAV). That's why I made a child of NAV. However I can't seem to place the buttons over the bar.
Html
<body>
<nav class="row">
<ul class="menu">
<li id="link1">Link 1</li>
<li id="link2">Link 2</li>
<li id="link3">Link 3</li>
<li id="link4">Link 4</li>
<li id="link5">Link 5</li>
</ul>
</nav>
<div class="row main">
#RenderBody()
</div>
CSS
nav, div, li {
-moz-box-sizing: content-box;
-webkit-box-sizing: content-box;
box-sizing: content-box;
border: 1px dashed black;
}
.row {
width: 100%;
padding-left: 20px;
padding-right: 20px;
}
nav {
position: fixed;
top: 80px;
height: 40px;
z-index: 100;
background-color: Green;
border-bottom: solid greenyellow 2px;
}
.menu li {
display: block;
background-color: darkgreen;
float: left;
height: 40px;
width: 60px;
}
.menu a {
color: white;
}
Result
It can be fixed by several things, like button margin or placing the buttons relative with a negative Top offset. However, these solutions feel 'dirty', like it's not the right way to do it. Why are the LI's not on top of NAV?
because your broswer applies by default some margin to the ul tag
try adding
ul {
margin: 0;
}
you could avoid these issues by using a css reset (Eric Meyer is the authority here: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/) or Necolas' Normalize.css: http://necolas.github.io/normalize.css/
the first one zeroes all the values of all elements - you have to rebuild the style of some elements like lists.
The second one normalizes the values of elements to fix browsers inconsistencies
When you use the "float" property on some elements (here the "LI"), the parent (here the "menu") ignore his floating children to calculate his height.
So you have to specify a valid height to your menu, or probably better, use "overflow:auto" on it to remember him his children.
So remove your
nav {
height:40px;
}
and add in your CSS :
.menu {
overflow:auto;
}
As in this fiddle : http://jsfiddle.net/bE3QH/
When using the element ul it sometimes creates whitespace on browsers. By making the margin 0px you are removing the whitespace decreasing the area used by element. hope this helps. The following code can be used...
ul {
margin:0px
}
You can use this instead of your code.
You will get ready made menu control on this website.
You can modify as you want & you will get your menu control available in a moment.
Here's the link.
http://cssmenumaker.com
http://tympanus.net/codrops/2010/07/16/slide-down-box-menu/
http://cssmenumaker.com/builder/1666948
Please check it out.
These are very useful and it will definitely save your time as well.
I hope this will resolve your issue.
Add this to your CSS:
ul{
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
This clears the default properties for ul elements
You would be better off if you didn't specify a width and a height for the list items, but rather displaying the anchor tags as blocks, and giving those a width and height.
I'm trying to create a CSS based menu for a site I'm creating, and not having much luck. Below you can see an image that shows what it is that I'm trying to achieve (the entire menu and header are in one block):
The upper half of the screen which is shown in a steel-blue colour in the image, will have contained in it, a div with a background image, and a heading one tag positioned absolutley to place the text over the top of the image.
The part below that, shown in an off-yellow colour in the example image, is a standard un-ordered list element containing normal li list tags.
Something like the following:
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>Page 1</li>
<li>Page 2</li>
<li>Page 3</li>
</ul>
Each of the list elements in the unordered list parent container will contain an anchor tag along the lines of:
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>Page 1</li>
<li>Page 2</li>
<li>Page 3</li>
</ul>
When a list item containing an anchor, has a href that matches the actual page being viewed, the intention is that it's height get's increased, such so that it grows outside of the un-ordered list parent that contains it. In doing this it overlays the steel-blue area of the parent page, something similar to the bright purple rectangle in the example image.
A list item that is not matched, and not hovered, shown as blue rectangles in the example image, should remain inside the parent unordered list and with its default background styling and colours.
When a list item is hovered, it should change to a style that is the same as one that is matched to the page, height wise, and be outside the parent list, but it should take on a different colour to show that it's hovered and not matched, and it should return to it's previous state (The blue rectangles) after the hover is finished.
I sort of have things partially working, this is how it currently looks:
As you can see, the actual unordered list element will not flow down and each of the list items inside of it overlap each other, I suspect this is because I have each list item set up with absolute positioning.
If I change the list items so they use relative positioning, it solves the overlap issue, however that prevents the list items from popping up over the top of the parent list element and overlaying the steel-blue section of the image.
There is also one other complication. I have very little control of the generated mark-up as this is being produced by a CMS (mojoPortal to be exact). The mark-up that is being generated by ASP.NET is currently as follows:
<nav class="span12" id="ctl00_SiteMenu1_ctl00">
<ul id="ctl00_SiteMenu1_ctl00_UL" class="root-nav">
<li class="current">
Home
</li>
<li>
Contact Us
</li>
<li>
Frogs
</li>
</ul>
</nav>
I know that the classes root-nav and current are defined elsewhere, and I do have the ability to override ANY CSS rules existing with any of my own.
The example above with the overlapping, this is defined as follows:
.mainhead
{
background: url(img/menu-banner.png);
height: 170px;
}
ul.root-nav
{
background: #B3A90E;
border-radius: 0px;
z-index: 1000;
position: relative;
width: 1170px;
}
ul.root-nav li.current > a
{
background-color: #B30D9E;
background-image: none;
height: 100px;
z-index: 1010;
position: absolute;
bottom: -30px;
border-radius: 25px 25px 0px 0px;
width: 100px;
display: block;
}
ul.root-nav li > a
{
background-color: #1C10B3;
background-image: none;
z-index: 1010;
position: absolute;
bottom: -30px;
border-radius: 25px 25px 0px 0px;
width: 100px;
}
ul.root-nav li > a:hover
{
background-color: #0BB312;
background-image: none;
height: 100px;
z-index: 1010;
position: absolute;
bottom: -30px;
border-radius: 25px 25px 0px 0px;
width: 100px;
}
I'd like to get this working with the overlay, instead of my alternitive, which is to make the yellow area the maximum height I expect any of the pop-up items to be and fix it in place so nothing moves when heights change.
I'm doing this in HTML5 so HTML5 markup and CSS rules are perfectly fine.
Thanks in advance for any ideas anyone comes up with.
and in about an hour... I'm back.
and here's something that definitely should be a top question on stack overflow...
WHY? when ever you post a question on stack overflow do you usually end up solving it yourself, in a pretty short time afterwards.
Anyway, enough of that.
The reason I was getting the overlap I was getting above was beacuse I wasn't setting the LI sizes.
Simply adding the following rules:
ul.root-nav li.current
{
min-width: 100px;
}
ul.root-nav li
{
min-width: 100px;
}
to my stylsheet, just before ul.root-nav li-current > a resolved my issue.
I was correct about my thoughts on the height not being set for the UL due to the absolute positioning, but setting a fixed height on that did the trick.
This is my code for a drop down menu. I pulled the code from a tutorial that produced this: http://www.webdesigndev.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/fancydropdown.html
But instead of text navigation I have images as you can see in the CSS attached to the span id's. With this code, I'm given the dropdown menus for each span correctly, I just can't get rid of the white space between them.
I know a new line in HTML between divs/spans create whitespaces, but I want to know a way to rid of them in CSS.
<div id="menu">
<ul class="tabs">
<li class="hasmore"><span id="bird"></span>
<ul class="dropdown">
<li>Menu item 1</li>
<li>Menu item 2</li>
<li class="last">Menu item 6</li>
</ul></li><li class="hasmore"><span id="wild"></span>
<ul class="dropdown">
<li>Menu item 1</li>
<li>Menu item 2</li>
<li class="last">Menu item 6</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
This is some CSS that applies:
#menu ul
{
margin: 0 auto;
}
ul.tabs
{
display: table;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
list-style: none;
position: relative;
}
ul.tabs li
{
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
list-style: none;
display: table-cell;
float: left;
position: relative;
}
ul.tabs a
{
position: relative;
display: block;
}
#bird {
background-image:url(images/birdingnav.png);
width:80px;
height: 20px;
text-indent:-9009px;
font-size: 0px;
border: 0;
}
#wild {
background-image:url(images/wildernessnav.png);
width:119px;
height: 20px;
text-indent:-9009px;
font-size:0px;
border: 0;
}
What do I need to do to this code in CSS to get rid of the white space that appears between my span images?
This is a common problem. More common with inline-block than inline, as inline usually means it's in the flow of text, where white space is relevant. With inline-block, people are using it for layout, and the white space becomes a problem.
There is a new CSS property specifically trying to deal with this issue - white-space:collapse; and white-space-collapse: discard;, but sadly it isn't supported by any of the major browsers yet. So that's not an option.
In the absence of that, the solutions to this tend to be a bit hacky.
One common solution is to set the container element to font-size:0;. This effectively renders the white space irrelevant; it's still there, but doesn't take up any space. The downside here is that you then need to set the font-size back again for the internal elements. If you're using a dynamic layout, with em based font-sizes, this can be tricky to handle.
Switching the layout to a float:left layout will remove this issue, but introduces other problems. Personally I've never liked working with float, but it might be the answer for some cases.
You could also use Javascript to remove the spaces, but that really is a hack.
Other than that, re-arranging the HTML code to remove the spaces is the most likely best solution. I know it's not the one you wanted though.
Try setting display: inline-block on the image elements. Spans are supposed to be inline, so the best solution would be to not use spans at all, but since you said don't change the html...
See how there's no spaces between the images in this fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/rVTZc/
From this style:
#menu ul li a:hover span {
background: url("images/topselectionright.png") repeat scroll right top transparent;
}
remove
right top
If I understand you correctly, maybe ul { font-size:0 } would help?
well i am not good with CSS menus.... i need TO MAKE THIS but was unable to align text to the bottom of listli
so it tried to do this with tables.. i was thinking Display Block is gonna solve my problems but turned out it didn't... you see in the jsFiddle example that i posted, when mouse is on the top areas of cell the link doesnot work which is true because there is no link there... can somebody please tell me how to convert it to CSS Menu
I would suggest making the menu with an unordered list instead of tables. Something like this:
HTML:
<ul id="my_menu">
<li>Name of Page 1</li>
<li>Name of Page 2</li>
<li>Name of Page 3</li>
<li>Name of Page 4</li>
</ul>
CSS:
ul#my_menu, ul#my_menu li {list-style: none;}
ul#my_menu li {display: block; float: left; width: 100px; height: 100px;}
ul#my_menu li a {display: block; text-decoration: none; color: #ccc; background: url('url_of_gradient') repeat-x; padding: 70px 10px 10px 10px; width: 80px; height: 20px;}
ul#my_menu li a:hover {background: url('url_of_hover_gradient') repeat-x;}
Try something like this, setting a gradient image (you'll have to make this) as the background on the links. Then create another image for the hover state. You'll also have to tweak the heights and widths to your liking.
This shouldn't require any javascript.
Here's a CSS menu generator that can get you started, I used it a while ago and it did fine for my project :)
Suckerfish dropwdown generator.
More:
My CSS Menu
Wonder Webware
Pure CSS Menu
The list goes on...
Hope it helps :)
I have a menu built with jquery from apycom.com that I am trying to center.
The menu items are from a cms and dynamically created when the page loads. So this means that the menu isn't a fixed width.
I have tried several methods using just css, but without having a width set for the menu, they don't want to work.
I have found some information that leads me to believe that there may be a way to do it with javascript.
Is there is a way to dynamically set the width of the div element around the menu and then set the left and right margins to auto to center the menu?
If there is a better way to accomplish this, I am open to ideas.
Thanks in advance
Bjorn
Here is a sample of what I have thus far.
I have already tried using 'margin: 0 auto;' but without a width setting that doesn't work. Because the menu is created by looping over the menu items available from the cms, I don't know the width of the menu.
I've tried using 'display: inline-block;' as well, and that get's me to a point that the block space the menu takes up is only the width of the menu. Now I just need to be able to center that block. I thought that there might be a way that once the menu has been created and the width is then known that you could then apply the margin settings.
Maybe similar to the way jquery is able to apply and change style settings on the fly.
<div class="top_navigation_bar">
<div id="menu">
<ul class="menu">
<li><a class="parent" href="/en/"><span>Home</span></a></li>
<li><a class="parent" href="/en/web-design"><span>Web Design</span></a>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span>Design Packages</span></li>
<li><span>Website Maintenance</span></li>
<li><span>Redesign Website</span></li>
<li><span>Design Fundamentals</span></li>
<li><span>Design Key Elements</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</li>
<li><a class="parent" href="/en/website-business-solutions"><span>Business Solutions</span></a></li>
<li><a class="parent" href="/en/internet-marketing"><span>Internet Marketing</span></a>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span>Small Business Marketing</span></li>
<li><span>Leveraging the Internet</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</li>
<li><a class="parent" href="/en/doing-business"><span>About Us</span></a>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span>Design Team</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</li>
<li><a class="parent" href="/en/blog"><span>Blog</span></a></li>
<li><a class="parent" href="/en/contact-us"><span>Contact</span></a></li>
<li class="last"><span>FAQ</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
.top_navigation_bar {
height: 46px;
padding-top: 4px;
background-color: #3a8658;
}
div#menu {
height: 46px;
padding-left: 24px;
background: url(/site_media/template_images/images/left.png) no-repeat;
_background: url(/site_media/template_images/images/left.gif) no-repeat;
width:auto;
}
div#menu ul {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
list-style: none;
float: left;
}
Without a sample makes harder to see what exactly is happening. It would be nice if you post a sample for HTML and CSS you are using. But going blind...
For horizontal centering an element with CSS, you can do:
element {margin: 0px auto;}
This is enough to correctly center an element.
Note that block elements (like div, ul, li and p) tends to fill 100% horizontally. Floating elements or absolute positioning them makes they loose this fullfillment characterist. If this is the case, the elements will wrap to minimum comfortable size that allows the content to be displayed, unless you set width and/or overflow properties.
If you set width, and content is larger than the declared width, it will or overflow, or wrap. You have CSS properties to handle those cases too.
I recommend doind this with CSS, because makes layout more accessible. But if you prefer, you can code width with javascript or jquery, making your life a bit easier.
To process that with javascript, you'll need something like:
myMenuElement.style.width = "200px";
with Jquery (width method):
$('#myMenuElement').width(200);
Cheers.
EDIT
Not sure what is exactly the desired effect, but I made a few changes in your css. Check.
.top_navigation_bar {
height: 46px;
padding-top: 4px;
background-color: #3a8658;
}
div#menu {
height: 46px;
padding-left: 24px;
}
div#menu ul {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
list-style: none;
}
ul.menu>li {
display: inline;
position: relative;
}
ul.menu>li>div {
display: block;
position: absolute;
left: 0%;
}
ul.menu span {
white-space: nowrap;
}
Follow a good reference from both, vertical and horizontal menus (I've learned from those).
If you are trying to center the #menu inside the .top_navigation_bar then you could use the margin:0 auto and additionally use jQuery like this
$(function(){
$menu = $('#menu');
$menu.width(
$('.menu').outerWidth() +
$menu.outerWidth() - $menu.width()
);
// added the following line, because the lavalamp plugin
// corrects itself when the window resizes..
// so we trigger a resize event, and the plugin fixes everything ;)
$(window).trigger('resize');
});
this will resize the #menu according to its contents, and will become centered because of the auto margin we set in css.
example at http://www.jsfiddle.net/MCnbr/