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Pure CSS Elegant Drop Menu And horizontal menu

Created 14 years ago   Views 13541   downloads 2071    Author Lam Nguyen
Pure CSS Elegant Drop Menu And horizontal menu
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Why do we love to use Drop Menu to display our navigation? Because, it saves space for our website. If you’re building a website with many categories, you need to use drop down menu technique for sure. We can find over internet a lot of tutorials show us how to build a Navigation with drop effect by using Javascript.  with this example, you will see a simplest way to build a same effect by using CSS only. With some CSS make-up, your menu will be elegant. Not sure which one is easiest, but for sure it’s the simplest menu comes with drop effect: horizontal and vertical navigation.

Step 1: HTML Code

As I said above, this tutorial comes with CSS only, you don’t need to include any javascripts to your <head> tag 

  <ul id="horizontal-navigation">
    <li class=""> <a href="#">Parent Item 1</a> </li>
    <li class=""> <a href="#">Parent Item 2</a>
      <ul>
        <li class=""> <a href="#">Child Item 1</a> </li>
        <li class=""> <a href="#">Child Item 2</a> </li>
        <li class=""> <a href="#">Child Item 3</a> </li>
      </ul>
    </li>
    
    <!-- Begin parent item -->
    <li class=""> <a href="#">Parent Item 3</a>
      
      <!-- Begin Child Items Group-->
      <ul>
      
        <!-- Begin Child Item-->
        <li class=""> <a href="#">Child Item 1</a> </li>
        <li class=""> <a href="#">Child Item 2</a> </li>
        
      </ul>
      <!-- End Child Items Group-->
      
    </li>
    <!-- End parent item -->
    
    <li class=""> <a href="#">Parent Item 4</a> </li>
  </ul>

As code above, you see that all child items will be enclosed inside its Parent Item. We’re using 2 tiers of menu, and the structure of each one completed with Parent and Child is: 

    <!-- Begin parent item -->
    <li class=""> <a href="#">Parent Item 3</a>
      
      <!-- Begin Child Items Group-->
      <ul>
      
        <!-- Begin Child Item-->
        <li class=""> <a href="#">Child Item 1</a> </li>
        <li class=""> <a href="#">Child Item 2</a> </li>
        
      </ul>
      <!-- End Child Items Group-->
      
    </li>
    <!-- End parent item -->

Step 2: CSS Code

Ya! Look at CSS code below. I will organize CSS code into each applied part. CSS code for the hold Navigation and Parent Items is: 

/* Navigation */
#navigation {
    list-style: none;
    font-family: "Century Gothic", Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    font-size: 1.2em;
}

/* CSS for each Parent Item */
#navigation li
{
    clear: both;
    height: 2em;
}

#navigation li a
{
    float: left;
    display: block;
    padding: 4px;
    text-decoration: none;
    color: #666;
    text-transform: uppercase;
    margin-bottom: 5px;
    margin-right: 10px;
}

/* Change background color and font color
of parent items when mouse hover */
#navigation li:hover a,
#navigation li a:hover
{
    background: #999;
    color: #fff;
}

And below is for Child Items 

/*
Applie to group of Child Items
Each Child Item will be invisible by default
*/
#navigation ul {display: none;}

/* Each Child Item will be visible if mouse hover */
#navigation li:hover ul {display: block;}

#navigation ul
{
    list-style: none;
    float: left;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 4px 8px;
}

#navigation ul li
{
    float: left;
    clear: none;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    width: auto;
    height: auto;
    color: #999;
}

Finally, we have to reset and re style the link inside each child item because the link already formatted above, you can find it inside css code block of Parent Item. 

/*
Reset and re style
link of each child item
*/
#navigation li:hover ul li a,
#navigation ul li a
{
    display: inline;
    padding: 0 6px 0 0;
    float: none;
    text-transform: lowercase;
    color: #999;
    background: none;
}

#navigation li:hover ul li a:hover,
#navigation ul li a:hover
{
    background: none;
    color: #000;
}

That’s all we need to make the Navigation works.

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