Archive for February, 2010

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

  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:

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  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 as 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:

  decimal decimal-leading-zero armenian georgian lower-aplha upper-alpha lower-greek upper-greek lower-latin

  upper-latin lower-roman upper-roman hebrew cjk-ideographic hiragana hiragana-iroha katakana 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,

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  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 click on the download button below!

  
  lists.zip
  Size: 9.76 KB