In Tips, Tutorials Oct 7, 200831
jQuery & CSS Example - Dropdown Menu
Dropdown menus and menu bars have been heavily used since the early days of graphical user interfaces. Their use has become ubiquitous, and even expected, in desktop applications, and the web has quickly followed suit. This article is intended to describe an extremely basic, yet extremely powerful, technique for adding dropdown menus in your application user interface or website design.
The Finished Product
Getting Started
To begin, we need to define our basic menu hierarchy. In order to maintain a structured and semantic approach to this, we will use nothing more than unordered lists of standard links. We’ll use the following code as an example:
<ul id="cssdropdown">
<li class="headlink">
<a href="mine.html?search_engines">Search Engines</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://google.com/">Google</a></li>
<li><a href="http://yahoo.com/">Yahoo</a></li>
<li><a href="http://live.com/">Live Search</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="headlink">
<a href="mine.html?shopping">Shopping</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://amazon.com/">Amazon</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ebay.com/">eBay</a></li>
<li><a href="http://craigslist.com/">CraigsList</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
You should see something like this:
Creating Dropdown Lists
With our semantic HTML and link structure written out, we can proceed to apply some basic hover techniques that are included in CSS. The :hover pseudo-class is invoked when the mouse is placed over the list item.
We can use CSS to hide the child unordered lists by default, and show them with the :hover pseudo-class, like so:
li.headlink ul { display: none; }
li.headlink:hover ul { display: block; }It is best to take this opportunity to apply some basic styling to the list, such as floating the parent unordered lists in a row, and specifying the width of the unordered list to ensure that no shifting occurs when the elements are hidden or shown. This should look something like this:
The Issue with Internet Explorer
Unfortunately, while the :hover pseudo-class may be elegant, it does not work in Internet Explorer. At this point, a short bit of JavaScript is required to provide a clean fix. All we need to do is select all unordered lists that are within a list item that has the class .headlink and add onmouseover and onmouseout events to them. This can be done in twelve simple lines of code:
window.onload = function()
{
var lis = document.getElementsByTagName('li');
for(i = 0; i < lis.length; i++)
{
var li = lis[i];
if (li.className == 'headlink')
{
li.onmouseover = function() { this.getElementsByTagName('ul').item(0).style.display = 'block'; }
li.onmouseout = function() { this.getElementsByTagName('ul').item(0).style.display = 'none'; }
}
}
}
Those using jQuery are privileged to an even easier solution:
$(document).ready(function(){
$('li.headlink').hover(
function() { $('ul', this).css('display', 'block'); },
function() { $('ul', this).css('display', 'none'); });
});
Putting It All Together
The dropdown menu is now functional in the major browsers, and is ready to be styled, cleaned up, and shipped.
It is advantageous to start by applying a basic style that’s a little more appealing than the standard lists. This allows us to visualize how this will fit into our application or design.
Adding Some Flare
With a few extra lines of CSS, the menu is styled and ready to fit into our site.
Wrapping Up
One important aspect of writing a generic dropdown list is to segregate the CSS and JavaScript to ensure that there are no conflicts. The easiest way to do this is to add the #cssdropdown selector in front of every element.
Finally, we check to see if the #cssdropdown div can be moved around freely. This ensures that dropdown menu we have created will flow nicely when integrated with our existing site design or application user interface.
The full code and example remains both basic and concise to exemplify the simplicity of the underlying technique for using dropdown menus on your website. Enjoy!
Tutorial kindly written by Nathan Wong
31 Comments
Oct 7, 2008
This one’s going in the bookmarks. I was looking for a clear explanation of this. Some tutorials I’ve seen have lines and lines of unnecessary markup. Thanks for keeping this simple.
Oct 7, 2008
Awesome tutorial and example. Drop downs consume a ton of hair-pulling time for me - I appreciate the help!!
Oct 8, 2008
Very nice blog http://designreviver.com/
Oct 8, 2008
Nice tut and inspirational outcome!
I needed detailed tutorial like this - so thanks, appreciated!
Oct 8, 2008
I’m glad you guys are making use of the tutorial. I appreciate the kind words. Keep an eye out over this coming week for a handful of jQuery/CSS tutorials on various common UI elements!
Oct 9, 2008
Wow, cool tutorial. I’ll bookmark this. Thx a lot
Oct 9, 2008
Thangs …Bro
Oct 10, 2008
It’s a good simple system. But if you are looking for more complex stuff, more personizable options, compatibilty with flash z-index etc… jdmenu is the best
Oct 10, 2008
What about adding a delay to the mouse out event? That way if you accidentally move the mouse the wrong way, it won’t close the pulldown. This helps when the dropdowns get complicated (with sub-dropdowns, etc). Do you have an easy way of doing this? Or perhaps adding a slower animation to the pulling down of the menu, that would help to. I realize your purpose of making it simple, and that’s awesome. This is one the simplest and best described tuts on this I’ve seen.
Oct 10, 2008
Great article! Very useful.
Oct 11, 2008
very nice. I like CSS examples and am also inclined towards jQuery as well.
Oct 11, 2008
@Tim: I second that!
Oct 11, 2008
It really is a nice example, showing in simple but still with some details about setting up a nice one level CSS drop-down menu. Addition of jQuery also enhances its usability.
Thanks for the effort.
Oct 11, 2008
Is it possible to create a multi column div that drops down from each category like johnlewis.com?
Oct 13, 2008
Very good tutorial. Nice and simple.
Oct 14, 2008
Hey,
Great Job……
Nice tutorial
Oct 14, 2008
Kim: Yeah, you could use a div instead of an unordered list for the dropdown part and you should be able to float within it without too much trouble. It would take some changes, but overall wouldn’t be too hard. Post a comment up if you try and can’t get it working.
Oct 15, 2008
hi. this really helped me out a lot. i am happy.
Oct 15, 2008
Nicely done. Minor nitpick: we should add visual “flair,” unless the menu is intended to light on fire, in which case “flare” would work
Oct 17, 2008
Nice work I am going to use this. thanks
Oct 17, 2008
Now, is this just me?
I can view this page fine in IE, but in FireFox I can see the comments, but not the article itself.
Oct 17, 2008
Nathan, I love the tutorial and find it working well with Safari and Firefox. I am having a bit of trouble with Internet Explorer. When using the javascript, it bumps the text nested in a div out of its way. In FF and Safari the dropdowns show up over the text. Any thoughts? I am using it at http://www.aviationutah.com.
Thanks,
Cameron Peterson
Oct 19, 2008
Thank you so much for such a clear and concise tutorial.
Oct 22, 2008
Cam: What version of IE? I only have access to IE7 at the moment and it’s looking fine for me. Or have you fixed it yourself? Thanks for the kind words.
Oct 27, 2008
This is Great Creating Dropdown Lists will come in handy, when we create our favorite Links Page!
Thanks
BOB
Oct 28, 2008
Hey, first off this is a really good example of a drop down. Very simple, very solid and very easy to alter.
But I’m having an issue with the popup sometimes showing behind content on the page. Is there any way of changing the z-index so it’s always in front?
Thanks
Shaun
Oct 28, 2008
Ignore me, it was very simple, in case anyone else has a simular issue. Just add a high number (eg. z-index:10) to the CSS and it will always be in front. If you have flash files don’t forget to set your Flash files to wmode=”transparent”. Everything should work fine and dandy.
Oct 29, 2008
Glad you found a solution, Shaun, and thanks for sharing with the rest of us.
Oct 30, 2008
Really cool…
Keep it up !!
Nov 14, 2008
This is great tutorial, but why to use jquery if you can make exactly the same effect/stuff with pure html and css, which will be accessible all the time, with enabled/disabled JS.
Great tut anyway, helps a lot to understand the basics of jQuery.
Nov 19, 2008
It’s that IE doesn’t support the CSS :hover pseudo-element on anything but anchor tags. The JS is used to make IE work. I know, it’s disappointing we can’t just use CSS, but that’s the hand we’ve been dealt.
Glad you like it!
- Nathan
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