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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T23:46:38+00:00

Using just CSS (and JS to apply :hover styles), what’s the best way to

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Using just CSS (and JS to apply :hover styles), what’s the best way to build horizontal dropdown nested menus?

I’m trying to adopt the menus here, but I can’t achieve the positioning I want. Every time I attempt this, I wind up with so much CSS cludge that it’s no longer manageable.

DOM:

<nav>
  <ul>
    <li>
      <a href="#">Heading 1</a>
      <ul>
         <li><a href="#">1</a>
               <ul><li>a</li><li>b</li></ul>
         </li>
         <li>2</li><li>3</li>
      </ul>
    </li>
    <li>
      <a href="#">Heading 2</a>
        <ul><li>1</li><li>2</li><li>3</li></ul>
    </li>
</nav>

Desired output:

alt text

That is, the top header is entirely horizontal, the first menu beneath each header lines up horizontally on the left of the header, and all further submenus line up horizontally on the right and vertically on the top. How would I go about building this basic idea?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I was able to create one myself but I am not sure if it good enough or not. I’d rather suggest that you look at jQuery UI Development & Planning Wiki > Menu page. The page lists a couple of menus.

    Also, this is a very simple script for creating dropdown menus which might serve as a starting point.

    Edit

    To create dynamic CSS popup menus, you’ll need jQuery support, mainly because (i) you have to position the sub-menus dynamically (ii) leverage the “hover” events which is not possible with a CSS only solution.

    1. Your main-menu <ul> should be position: static
    2. All of your <li> that contain a sub-menu should be position: relative
    3. All of your sub-menu <ul> should be position: absolute and display: none.

    You can then implement hover event on all <li> elements that contain a sub-menu. On hover, you first position the <ul> that is nested directly within that <li>, then you show it. The hover event also provides an event that fires when that element is “un-hovered”. In this event you simply hide the corresponding <ul>. Easy?

    To position the <ul> which is a sub-menu, just grab the width of the containing <li> and set the left: XXXpx; top: 0 on the <ul> you’re about to display. If the sub-menu is to appear below the <li> then instead you grab the height of the <li> and set the left: 0; top: YYYpx on the <ul>. The absolute-relative combination makes such kind of positioning possible.

    At this point you can also consider implementing “edge detection”… that is to check if the menu expands past the right or bottom edge of the view port. Pretty tricky.

    Note that in IE7 will have problems rendering the menus (and trigger the hover event) properly although according to the HTML specs your menu is OK. To counter this you may want to set z-indexes on your sub menus.

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