CSS: Rollover Menu

This is a quick demonstration of how to make a rollover menu. An example is shown here.

Sample Rollover Menu

My goal was to create a rollover menu with included these features:

The menu is contained in a <div> tag with a class of RolloverMenu. The menu items are contained in a simple unordered list. The CSS styling takes only six lines, 7-12 shown below.

  • Line 7 - Sets the width of the menu and defines the font size, weight, and color.
  • Line 8 - Removes the bullets and indentation from the list.
  • Line 9 - Sets the background color, puts a small margin around the menu items and centers the text.
  • Line 10 - A little magic happens here. Setting the display type to block is what makes the entire area clickable. Otherwise, only the text is clickable. Since this is a menu, text decoration is turned off for links in the menu. A border is drawn here instead of around the <li> tag to prevent any sort of outer box from showing when we mouse over.
  • Line 11 - Swap the background color when the mouse passes over.
  • Line 12 - Turn off any text color changes when the mouse passes over.

Here is some sample source code demonstrating the menu on a stand alone page. Click on the pages title link to view the example. Use the view source option of your browser to get the actual source code.

RolloverCSSMenu.html

For a book with lots of CSS examples check out: