This content originally appeared on Modern CSS Solutions for Old CSS Problems and was authored by Stephanie Eckles
This is the fifth post in a series examining modern CSS solutions to problems I've been solving over the last 13+ years of being a frontend developer.
This tutorial will show how to use CSS grid layout for easy custom list styling in addition to:
- Data attributes as the content of pseudo elements
- CSS counters for styling ordered lists
- CSS custom variables for per-list item styling
- Responsive multi-column lists
Update: The
::marker
pseudo selector is now well supported in modern browsers. Shile this tutorial includes handy CSS tips for the items listed above, you may want to jump to the::marker
solution
List HTML#
First we'll setup our HTML, with one ul
and one li
. I've included a longer bullet to assist in checking alignment, spacing, and line-heihgt.
<ul role="list">
<li>Unordered list item</li>
<li>Cake ice cream sweet sesame snaps dragée cupcake wafer cookie</li>
<li>Unordered list item</li>
</ul>
<ol role="list">
<li>Ordered list item</li>
<li>Cake ice cream sweet sesame snaps dragée cupcake wafer cookie</li>
<li>Ordered list item</li>
</ol>
Note the use of role="list"
. At first, it may seem extra, but we are going to remove the inherent list style with CSS. While CSS doesn't often affect the semantic value of elements, list-style: none
can remove list semantics for some screen readers. The easiest fix is to define the role
attribute to reinstate those semantics. You can learn more from this article from Scott O'Hara.
Base List CSS#
First we add a reset of list styles in addition to defining them as a grid with a gap.
ol,
ul {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
list-style: none;
display: grid;
grid-gap: 1rem;
}
The grid-gap
benefit is adding space between li
, taking the place of an older method such as li + li { margin-top: ... }
.
Next, we'll prepare the list items:
li {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 0 1fr;
grid-gap: 1.75em;
align-items: start;
font-size: 1.5rem;
line-height: 1.25;
}
We've also set list items up to use grid. And we've upgraded an older "hack" of using padding-left
to leave space for an absolute positioned pseduo element with a combo of a 0
width first column and grid-gap
. We'll see how that works in a moment. Then we use align-items: start
instead of the default of stretch
, and apply some type styling.
UL: Data attributes for emoji bullets#
Now, this may not exactly be a scalable solution, but for fun we're going to add a custom data attribute that will define an emoji to use as the bullet for each list item.
First, let's update the ul
HTML:
<ul role="list">
<li data-icon="?">Unordered list item</li>
<li data-icon="?">Cake ice cream sweet sesame snaps dragée cupcake wafer cookie</li>
<li data-icon="?">Unordered list item</li>
</ul>
And to apply the emojis as bullets, we use a pretty magical technique where data attributes can be used as the value of the content
property for pseudo elements:
ul li::before {
content: attr(data-icon);
/* Make slightly larger than the li font-size
but smaller than the li grid-gap */
font-size: 1.25em;
}
Here's the result, with the ::before
element inspected to help illustrate how the grid is working:
The emoji still is allowed to take up width to be visible, but effectively sits in the grid-gap. You can experiment with setting the first li
grid column to auto
which will cause grid-gap to fully be applied between the emoji column and the list text column.
OL: CSS counters and CSS custom variables#
CSS counters have been a viable solution since IE8, but we're going to add an extra flourish of using CSS custom variables to change the background color of each number as well.
We'll apply the CSS counter styles first, naming our counter orderedlist
:
ol {
counter-reset: orderedlist;
}
ol li::before {
counter-increment: orderedlist;
content: counter(orderedlist);
}
This achieves the following, which doesn't look much different than the default ol
styling:
Next, we can apply some base styling to the counter numbers:
/* Add to li::before rule */
font-family: "Indie Flower";
font-size: 1.25em;
line-height: 0.75;
width: 1.5rem;
padding-top: 0.25rem;
text-align: center;
color: #fff;
background-color: purple;
border-radius: 0.25em;
First, we apply a Google font and bump up the font-size
. The line-height
is half of the applied line-height
of the li
(at least that's what worked for this font, it may be a bit of a magic number). It aligns the number where we would like in relation to the main li
text content.
Then, we need to specify an explicit width. If not, the background will not appear even though the text will.
Padding is added to fix the alignment of the text against the background.
Now we have this:
That's certainly feeling more custom, but we'll push it a bit more by swapping the background-color
to a CSS custom variable, like so:
ol {
--li-bg: purple;
}
ol li::before {
background-color: var(--li-bg);
}
It will appear the same until we add inline styles to the second and third li
to update the variable value:
<ol role="list">
<li>Ordered list item</li>
<li style="--li-bg: darkcyan">Cake ice cream sweet sesame snaps dragée cupcake wafer cookie</li>
<li style="--li-bg: navy">Ordered list item</li>
</ol>
And here's the final ul
and ol
all put together:
By Stephanie Eckles (@5t3ph)
Upgrade your algos: Multi-column lists#
Our example only had 3 short list items, but don't forget we applied grid to the base ol
and ul
.
Whereas in a previous life I have done fun things with modulus in PHP to split up lists and apply extra classes to achieve evenly divided multi-column lists.
With CSS grid, you can now apply it in three lines with inherent responsiveness, equal columns, and respect to content line length:
ol, ul {
display: grid;
/* adjust the `min` value to your context */
grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(22ch, 1fr));
grid-gap: 1rem;
}
Applying to our existing example (be sure to remove the max-width
on the li
first) yields:
You can toggle this view by updating the $multicolumn
variable in Codepen to true
.
Gotcha: More than plain text as li
content#
If you have more than plain text inside the li
- including something like an innocent <a>
- our grid template will break.
However, it's a very easy solve - wrap the li
content in a span
. Our grid template doesn't care what the elements are, but it does only expect two elements, where the pseudo element counts as the first.
Upgrading to CSS Marker#
During the months after this article was originally posted, support for ::marker
became much better across all modern browsers.
The ::marker
pseudo selector allows directly changing and styling the ol
or ul
list bullet/numerical.
We can fully replace the solution for ul
bullets using ::marker
but we have to downgrade our ol
solution because there are only a few properties allowed for ::marker
:
animation-*
color
content
direction
font-*
transition-*
unicode-bidi
white-space
Unordered List Style With ::marker
#
Since content
is still an allowed property, we can keep our data-icon
solution for allowing custom emoji markers ?
We just need to swap ::before
to ::marker
:
ul li::marker {
content: attr(data-icon);
font-size: 1.25em;
}
Then remove the no longer needed grid properties from the li
and add back in some padding
to replace the removed grid-gap
:
li {
/* replace the grid properties with: */
padding-left: .5em;
}
Finally, we previously removed margin
but we need to add back in some left margin to ensure space for the ::marker
to prevent it being cut off due to overflow:
/* update in existing rule */
ol,
ul {
margin: 0 0 0 2em;
/* ...existing styles */
}
And the visual results is identical to our previous solution, as you can see in the demo.
Ordered List Style With ::marker
#
For our ordered list, we can now switch and take advantage of the built-in counter.
We also have to drop our background-color
and border-radius
so we'll swap to using our custom property for the color
value. And we'll change our custom property name to --marker-color
for clarity.
So our reduced styles are as follows:
ol {
--marker-color: purple;
}
li::marker {
content: counter(list-item);
font-family: "Indie Flower";
font-size: 1.5em;
color: var(--marker-color);
}
Don't forget to update the CSS custom property name in the HTML, too!
::marker
Demo#
Here's our updated custom list styles that now use ::marker
.
Be sure to check for current browser support to decide which custom list style solution to use based on your unique audience! You may want to choose to use ::marker
as a progressive enhancement from one of the previously demonstrated solutions.
By Stephanie Eckles (@5t3ph)
For more details on using
::marker
, check out this excellent article by Adam Argyle.
This content originally appeared on Modern CSS Solutions for Old CSS Problems and was authored by Stephanie Eckles
Stephanie Eckles | Sciencx (2020-04-18T02:01:36+00:00) Totally Custom List Styles. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2020/04/18/totally-custom-list-styles/
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