HTML list items are spoiled little brats. On surface you can’t do anything with them other then list some items in a document. But when styled well with CSS, they can become your ultimate weapon.

A list is very useful when you don’t know in advance how many items are there gonna be. It could be a few or hundreds.

Here is an example of using list items in my last application.

It’s also being used in WordPress sidebar widgets.

Let’s start with a basic un-ordered list in CSS:

ul {

/* My style goes here.. */

}

But if I target the global ul tag, then all the list items will be changed, so why not use a class instead?

I will use a .list class throughout this article. Here’s the html:

<ul class="list">

<li>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</li>

<li>Nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat</li>

<li>Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit</li>

<li>Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud</li>

<li>Culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim</li>

</ul>

It will look like this in the browser:

The first thing you wanna do is to make it lose its default appearance, by getting rid of the the bullets and removing the spacing:

.list {

list-style-type: none;

padding-left: 0;

}

Now that we have it just like a regular set of text, why not add some padding and borders around it? I do it by targeting the list items li of that list.

.list li {

padding: 10px;

border-bottom: 1px solid #dddddd;

}

Removing the last border

The list will look neat without the last border, let’s remove it by calling the css :last-child on it:

.list li:last-child {

border: 0;

}

This is really helpful for making the design consistent.

Cool!

Making cool hover effects

The list will look much more appealing when we put some hover effects on it:

.list li:hover {

background-color: #fffbc3;

}

This adds a cool hover effect on that list items.

Thing to know that you can use the :hover on almost any HTML element, not just on link items.

Alternating the list item styles

A cool thing you can do with your items is by setting alternate background colors to every other list item. In practice it looks like this:

This is really helpful for displaying really long list with lots of data per row. It helps with the user experience.

This is done with this little css snippet:

.list li:nth-child(odd) {

background-color: #bdf6e9;

}

The li:nth-child(odd) can also be changed into even to start the styling for every even numbered list item.

So hopefully with these little tricks you can style really cool web applications.

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