How do I *really* justify a horizontal menu in HTML+CSS?

flight_3377 0
Viewed 86413

You find plenty of tutorials on menu bars in HTML, but for this specific (though IMHO generic) case, I haven't found any decent solution:

#  THE MENU ITEMS    SHOULD BE    JUSTIFIED     JUST AS    PLAIN TEXT     WOULD BE  #
#  ^                                                                             ^  #
  • There's an varying number of text-only menu items and the page layout is fluid.
  • The first menu item should be left-aligned, the last menu item should be right-aligned.
  • The remaining items should be spread optimally on the menu bar.
  • The number is varying,so there's no chance to pre-calculate the optimal widths.

Note that a TABLE won't work here as well:

  • If you center all TDs, the first and the last item aren’t aligned correctly.
  • If you left-align and right-align the first resp. the last items, the spacing will be sub-optimal.

Isn’t it strange that there is no obvious way to implement this in a clean way by using HTML and CSS?

css html
14 Answers

The simplest thing to do is to is to force the line to break by inserting an element at the end of the line that will occupy more than the left available space and then hiding it. I've accomplished this quite easily with a simple span element like so:

#menu {
  text-align: justify;
}

#menu * {
  display: inline;
}

#menu li {
  display: inline-block;
}

#menu span {
  display: inline-block;
  position: relative;
  width: 100%;
  height: 0;
}
<div id="menu">
  <ul>
    <li><a href="#">Menu item 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Menu item 3</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Menu item 2</a></li>
  </ul>
  <span></span>
</div>

All the junk inside the #menu span selector is (as far as I've found) required to please most browsers. It should force the width of the span element to 100%, which should cause a line break since it is considered an inline element due to the display: inline-block rule. inline-block also makes the span possible to block-level style rules like width which causes the element to not fit in line with the menu and thus the menu to line-break.

You of course need to adjust the width of the span to your use case and design, but I hope you get the general idea and can adapt it.

user_618180

Ok, this solution doesn't work on IE6/7, because of the lack of support of :before/:after, but:

ul {
  text-align: justify;
  list-style: none;
  list-style-image: none;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}
ul:after {
  content: "";
  margin-left: 100%;
}
li {
  display: inline;
}
a {
  display: inline-block;
}
<div id="menu">
  <ul>
    <li><a href="#">Menu item 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Menu item 2</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Menu item 3</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Menu item 4</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Menu item 5</a></li>
  </ul>
</div>

The reason why I have the a tag as an inline-block is because I don't want the words inside to be justified as well, and I don't want to use non-breaking spaces either.

user_11836640

Got a solution. Works in FF, IE6, IE7, Webkit, etc.

Make sure you don't put any whitespace before closing the span.inner. IE6 will break.

You can optionally give .outer a width

.outer {
  text-align: justify;
}
.outer span.finish {
  display: inline-block;
  width: 100%;
}
.outer span.inner {
  display: inline-block;
  white-space: nowrap;
}
<div class="outer">
  <span class="inner">THE MENU ITEMS</span>
  <span class="inner">SHOULD BE</span>
  <span class="inner">JUSTIFIED</span>
  <span class="inner">JUST AS</span>
  <span class="inner">PLAIN TEXT</span>
  <span class="inner">WOULD BE</span>
  <span class="finish"></span>
</div>

user_649410

Make it a <p> with text-align: justify ?

Update: Nevermind. That doesn't work at all as I'd thought.

Update 2: Doesn't work in any browsers other than IE right now, but CSS3 has support for this in the form of text-align-last

Jordi_Bunster_42720

For Gecko-based browsers, I came up with this solution. This solution doesn't work with WebKit browsers, though (e.g. Chromium, Midori, Epiphany), they still show trailing space after the last item.

I put the menu bar in a justified paragraph. Problem is that the last line of a justified paragraph won't be rendered justified, for obvious reasons. Therefore I add a wide invisible element (e.g. an img) which warrants that the paragraph is at least two lines long.

Now the menu bar is justified by the same algorithm the browser uses for justifying plain text.

Code:

<div style="width:500px; background:#eee;">
 <p style="text-align:justify">
  <a href="#">THE&nbsp;MENU&nbsp;ITEMS</a>
  <a href="#">SHOULD&nbsp;BE</a>
  <a href="#">JUSTIFIED</a>
  <a href="#">JUST&nbsp;AS</a>
  <a href="#">PLAIN&nbsp;TEXT</a>
  <a href="#">WOULD&nbsp;BE</a>
  <img src="/Content/Img/stackoverflow-logo-250.png" width="400" height="0"/>
 </p>
 <p>There's an varying number of text-only menu items and the page layout is fluid.</p>
 <p>The first menu item should be left-aligned, the last menu item should be right-aligned. The remaining items should be spread optimal on the menu bar.</p>
 <p>The number is varying,so there's no chance to pre-calculate the optimal widths.</p>
 <p>Note that a TABLE won't work here as well:</p>
 <ul>
  <li>If you center all TDs, the first and the last item aren't aligned correctly.</li>
  <li>If you left-align and right-align the first resp. the last items, the spacing will be sub-optimal.</li>
 </ul>
</div>

Remark: Do you notice I cheated? To add the space filler element, I have to make some guess about the width of the menu bar. So this solution is not completely down to the rules.

flight_33770

try this

*{
        padding: 0;
        margin: 0;
        box-sizing: border-box;
    }
    ul {
        list-style: none;
        display: flex;
        align-items: center;
        justify-content: space-evenly;
    }
    <ul>
        <li>List item One</li>
        <li>List item Two</li>
        <li>List item Three </li>
        <li>List item Four</li>
    </ul>

user_191362740

I know the original question specified HTML + CSS, but it didn't specifically say no javascript ;)

Trying to keep the css and markup as clean as possible, and as semantically meaningful as possible to (using a UL for the menu) I came up with this suggestion. Probably not ideal, but it may be a good starting point:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

<html>

    <head>
        <title>Kind-of-justified horizontal menu</title>

        <style type="text/css">
        ul {
            list-style: none;
            margin: 0;
            padding: 0;
            width: 100%;
        }

        ul li {
            display: block;
            float: left;
            text-align: center;
        }
        </style>

        <script type="text/javascript">
            setMenu = function() {
                var items = document.getElementById("nav").getElementsByTagName("li");
                var newwidth = 100 / items.length;

                for(var i = 0; i < items.length; i++) {
                    items[i].style.width = newwidth + "%";
                }
            }
        </script>

    </head>

    <body>

        <ul id="nav">
            <li><a href="#">first item</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">item</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">item</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">item</a></li>
        <li><a href="#">item</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">last item</a></li>
        </ul>

        <script type="text/javascript">
            setMenu();
        </script>

    </body>

</html>
David_Heggie_43090
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