Today we’re going to talk about list styles. Lists are a vital commodity to web site creation. Most side-navigation menus and inline menus are actually lists that are simply listing the things we want them to. From there, we can add styles to these lists and manipulate them however we please.

Lists

In HTML there are two types of lists:

  • Ordered Lists <ol>
  • Unordered Lists <ul>

Ordered Lists are usually marked with numbers or letters whereas Unordered Lists are usually marked with bullets or squares.

List Type

We can change how a list looks by using the list-style-type property. Consider the following code:

ul {list-style-type:circle;}
ol {list-style-type:upper-roman;}

The CSS code above will make all ul elements have a list style type of a circle and all ol elements have a list style type of upper roman numerals. The output will look like the following:

  • Item 1
  • Item 2
  1. Item 1
  2. Item 2

Properties

We can have a few properties for list types and those properties operate the same way the background properties

Property Description Values
list-style This is the all inclusive property where you can define all of the values list-style-type
list-style-image
list-style-position
list-style-type This property will define type of list style you wish to have in the <li> element. none
disc
circle
square
decimal
decimal-leading-zero
armenian
georgian
lower-alpha
upper-alpha
lower-greek
lower-latin
upper-latin
lower-roman
upper-roman
hebrew
cjk-ideographic
hiragana
hiragana-iroha
katakana
katakana-iroha
list-style-image This property will allow you to define an image as the list marker. url(image url)
none
list-style-position This property will allow you to specify whether you want the list to be inside or outside the content flow. inside
outside

We can also narrow down the list-style and list-style-type properties for each list element.

Unordered Lists

For unordered lists we can use the following values:

  • circle
  • disc
  • square
  • none

Technically we can use any of the values listed in the table above, however, the purpose of the unordered list would cease to exist.

Ordered Lists

We can have many options for the ordered list. Out of the 23 values we posted for list-style-type, only three were solely for unordered lists. We can use the following values:

  1. decimal
  2. decimal-leading-zero
  3. armenian
  4. georgian
  5. lower-aplha
  6. upper-alpha
  7. lower-greek
  8. upper-greek
  9. lower-latin
  1. upper-latin
  2. lower-roman
  3. upper-roman
  4. hebrew
  5. cjk-ideographic
  6. hiragana
  7. hiragana-iroha
  8. katakana
  9. katakanap-iroha

Using images with lists

Using images can spice up just a standard web page by a lot. It is very easy to create your own bullet, circle, square, or a small arrow pointing toward the item you are showing in the list. We can use the all-inclusive,

list-style:url ("image/bullet.png");
/*OR*/
list-style-image:url ("image/bullet.png");

This will replace the default bullet in the unordered list with an image of our choice.

To see these properties in action feel free to download lists.zip(9.75KB)