Question

I am trying to write flexible code where I have one plain <ul> which gets automatically creates another column for every 5th element. I have found a tutorial that achieves this but places the items in a horizontal order whereas I require a vertical order. I have seen some other tutorials that outputs a vertical order, but also attaches class="first" and class="second" to each li which is not what I want. I am looking to do with with my existing HTML code.

What I Want:

-01     -06     -11   
-02     -07     -12
-03     -08     -13
-04     -09     -14
-05     -10     -15

What I Have:

-01     -02     -03   
-04     -05     -06
-07     -08     -09
-10     -11     -12
-13     -14     -15

CSS:

ul {
    width:760px;
    margin-bottom:20px;
    overflow:hidden;
}

li {   
    float:left;
    display:inline;
}

.double li  { width:50.0%; } /* 2 col */
.triple li  { width:33.3%; } /* 3 col */
.quad li    { width:25.0%; } /* 4 col */
.six li     { width:16.6%; } /* 6 col */

HTML:

<ul class="triple">
  <li>01</li>
  <li>02</li>
  <li>03</li>
  <li>04</li>
  <li>05</li>
  <li>06</li>
  <li>07</li>
  <li>08</li>
  <li>09</li>
  <li>10</li>
  <li>11</li>
  <li>12</li>
  <li>13</li>
  <li>14</li>
  <li>15</li>
</ul>

Answer 1

You can use this code:

ul
{
    -webkit-column-count: 4; -webkit-column-gap:20px;
    -moz-column-count:4; -moz-column-gap:20px;
    -o-column-count:4; -o-column-gap:20px;
    column-count:4; column-gap:20px;
}

but I’m not sure if it works in all browsers unfortunately. You should experiment that.

Here’s the jsFiddle to play with it: http://jsfiddle.net/leniel/nRL4R/