list-style – CSS-Tricks https://css-tricks.com Tips, Tricks, and Techniques on using Cascading Style Sheets. Thu, 02 Mar 2023 18:20:12 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://i0.wp.com/css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/star.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 list-style – CSS-Tricks https://css-tricks.com 32 32 45537868 Everything You Need to Know About the Gap After the List Marker https://css-tricks.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-gap-after-the-list-marker/ https://css-tricks.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-gap-after-the-list-marker/#comments Thu, 02 Mar 2023 18:20:03 +0000 https://css-tricks.com/?p=376748 I was reading “Creative List Styling” on Google’s web.dev blog and noticed something odd in one of the code examples in the ::marker section of the article. The built-in list markers are bullets, ordinal numbers, and letters. The ::marker pseudo-element …


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I was reading “Creative List Styling” on Google’s web.dev blog and noticed something odd in one of the code examples in the ::marker section of the article. The built-in list markers are bullets, ordinal numbers, and letters. The ::marker pseudo-element allows us to style these markers or replace them with a custom character or image.

::marker {
  content: url('/marker.svg') ' ';
}

The example that caught my attention uses an SVG icon as a custom marker for the list items. But there’s also a single space character (" ") in the CSS value next to the url() function. The purpose of this space seems to be to insert a gap after the custom marker.

When I saw this code, I immediately wondered if there was a better way to create the gap. Appending a space to content feels more like a workaround than the optimal solution. CSS provides margin and padding and other standard ways to space out elements on the page. Could none of these properties be used in this situation?

First, I tried to substitute the space character with a proper margin:

::marker {
  content: url('/marker.svg');
  margin-right: 1ch;
}

This didn’t work. As it turns out, ::marker only supports a small set of mostly text-related CSS properties. For example, you can change the font-size and color of the marker, and define a custom marker by setting content to a string or URL, as shown above. But the margin and padding properties are not supported, so setting them has no effect. What a disappointment.

Could it really be that a space character is the only way to insert a gap after a custom marker? I needed to find out. As I researched this topic, I made a few interesting discoveries that I’d like to share in this article.

Adding padding and margins

First, let’s confirm what margin and padding do on the <ul> and <li> elements. I’ve created a test page for this purpose. Drag the relevant sliders and observe the effect on the spacing on each side of the list marker. Tip: Use the Reset button liberally to reset all controls to their initial values.

Note: Browsers apply a default padding-inline-left of 40px to <ol> and <ul> elements. The logical padding-inline-left property is equivalent to the physical padding-left property in writing systems with a left-to-right inline direction. In this article, I’m going to use physical properties for the sake of simplicity.

As you can see, padding-left on <li> increases the gap after the list marker. The other three properties control the spacing to the left of the marker, in other words, the indentation of the list item.

Notice that even when the list item’s padding-left is 0px, there is still a minimum gap after the marker. This gap cannot be decreased with margin or padding. The exact length of the minimum gap depends on the browser.

First three properties: UL margin-left, UL padding-left, LI margin-left. Fourth property: LI padding-left.
The first three properties push the entire list item (including the marker) to the right. The fourth property pushes only the list item’s content to the right.

To sum up, the list item’s content is positioned at a browser-specific minimum distance from the marker, and this gap can be further increased by adding a padding-left to <li>.

Next, let’s see what happens when we position the marker inside the list item.

Moving the marker inside the list item

The list-style-position property accepts two keywords: outside, which is the default, and inside, which moves the marker inside the list item. The latter is useful for creating designs with full-width list items.

A grocery list. Each item has a thin bottom border that extends from the left to the right edge of the list.
The list marker is positioned inside the list item, so that the list item’s bottom border can extend to the left edge of the list box

If the marker is now inside the list item, does this mean that padding-left on <li> no longer increases the gap after the marker? Let’s find out. On my test page, turn on list-style-position: inside via the checkbox. How are the four padding and margin properties affected by this change?

As you can see, padding-left on <li> now increases the spacing to the left of the marker. This means that we’ve lost the ability to increase the gap after the marker. In this situation, it would be useful to be able to add margin-right to the ::marker itself, but that doesn’t work, as we’ve established above.

The four properties: UL margin-left, UL padding-left, LI margin-left, LI padding-left.
All four properties push the entire list item to the right. The minimum gap cannot be increased by standard means.

Additionally, there’s a bug in Chromium that causes the gap after the marker to triple after switching to inside positioning. By default, the length of the gap is about one-third of the text size. So at a default font-size of 16px, the gap is about 5.5px. After switching to inside, the gap grows to the full 16px in Chrome. This bug affects the disc, circle, and square markers, but not ordinal number markers.

The following image shows the default rendering of outside and inside-positioned list markers across three major browsers on macOS. For your convenience, I’ve horizontally aligned all list items on their markers to make it easier to compare the differences in gap sizes.

Six list items with varying gaps between the marker and text.
Only Firefox maintains the same gap size between the two marker positioning modes. This can be considered a browser interoperability (interop) issue.

To sum up, switching to list-style-position: inside introduces two problems. We can no longer increase the gap via padding-left on <li>, and the gap size is inconsistent between browsers.

Finally, let’s see what happens when we replace the default list marker with a custom marker.

Switching to a custom marker

There are two ways to define a custom marker:

  • list-style-type and list-style-image properties
  • content property on the ::marker pseudo-element

The content property is more powerful. For example, it allows us to use the counter() function to access the list item’s ordinal number (the implicit list-item counter) and decorate it with custom strings.

Unfortunately, Safari doesn’t support the content property on ::marker yet (WebKit bug). For this reason, I’m going to use the list-style-type property to define the custom marker. You can still use the ::marker selector to style the custom marker declared via list-style-type. That aspect of ::marker is supported in Safari.

Any Unicode character can potentially serve as a custom list marker, but only a small set of characters actually have “Bullet” in their official name, so I thought I’d compile them here for reference.

CharacterNameCode pointCSS keyword
BulletU+2022disc
Triangular BulletU+2023
Hyphen BulletU+2043
Black Leftwards BulletU+204C
Black Rightwards BulletU+204D
Inverse BulletU+25D8
White BulletU+25E6circle
Reversed Rotated Floral Heart BulletU+2619
Rotated Heavy Black Heart BulletU+2765
Rotated Floral Heart BulletU+2767
Circled White BulletU+29BE
⦿Circled BulletU+29BF

Note: The CSS square keyword does not have a corresponding “Bullet” character in Unicode. The character that comes closest is the Black Small Square (▪️) emoji (U+25AA).

Now let’s see what happens when we replace the default list marker with list-style-type: "•" (U+2022 Bullet). This is the same character as the default bullet, so there shouldn’t be any major rendering differences. On my test page, turn on the list-style-type option and observe any changes to the marker.

As you can see, there are two significant changes:

  1. There is no longer a minimum gap after the marker.
  2. The bullet has become smaller, as if it were rendered at a smaller font-size.

According to CSS Counter Styles Level 3, the default list marker (disc) should be “similar to • U+2022 BULLET”. It seems that browsers increase the size of the default bullet to make it more legible. Firefox even uses a special font, -moz-bullet-font, for the marker.

:marker selected in the inspector. Fonts used: -moz-bullet-font.
The “Fonts” pane in Firefox’s DOM inspector reveals the special font.

Can the small size problem be fixed with CSS? On my test page, turn on marker styling and observe what happens when you change the font-size, line-height, and font-family of the marker.

As you can see, increasing the font-size causes the custom marker to become vertically misaligned, and this cannot be corrected by decreasing the line-height. The vertical-align property, which could easily fix this problem, is not supported on ::marker.

But did you notice that changing the font-family can cause the marker to become bigger? Try setting it to Tahoma. This could potentially be a good-enough workaround for the small-size problem, although I haven’t tested which font works best across the major browsers and operating systems.

You may also have noticed that the Chromium bug doesn’t occur anymore when you position the marker inside the list item. This means that a custom marker can serve as a workaround for this bug. And this leads me to the main problem, and the reason why I started researching this topic. If you define a custom marker and position it inside the list item, there is no gap after the marker and no way to insert a gap by standard means.

  1. There is no minimum gap after custom markers.
  2. ::marker doesn’t support padding or margin.
  3. padding-left on <li> doesn’t increase the gap, since the marker is positioned inside.

Summary

Here’s a summary of all the key facts that I’ve mentioned in the article:

  1. Browsers apply a default padding-inline-start of 40px to <ul> and <ol> elements.
  2. There is a minimum gap after built-in list markers (disc, decimal, etc.). There is no minimum gap after custom markers (string or URL).
  3. The length of the gap can be increased by adding a padding-left to <ul>, but only if the marker is positioned outside the list item (the default mode).
  4. Custom string markers have a smaller default size than built-in markers. Changing the font-family on ::marker can increase their size.

Conclusion

Looking back at the code example from the beginning of the article, I think I understand now why there’s a space character in the content value. There is just no better way to insert a gap after the SVG marker. It’s a workaround that is needed because no amount of margin and padding can create a gap after a custom marker that is positioned inside the list item. A margin-right on ::marker could easily do it, but that is not supported.

Until ::marker adds support for more properties, web developers will often have no choice but to hide the marker and emulate it with a ::before pseudo-element. I had to do that myself recently because I couldn’t change the marker’s background-color. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait too long for a more powerful ::marker pseudo-element.


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List Markers and String Styles https://css-tricks.com/list-markers-and-string-styles/ https://css-tricks.com/list-markers-and-string-styles/#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2021 14:32:41 +0000 https://css-tricks.com/?p=339298 Lists—we’ve all worked with them in one form or another. I’m talking about HTML’s <ol> and <ul>. Much of the time, because we desire styling control, we turn off the list’s markers completely with list-style-type: none, and start …


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Lists—we’ve all worked with them in one form or another. I’m talking about HTML’s <ol> and <ul>. Much of the time, because we desire styling control, we turn off the list’s markers completely with list-style-type: none, and start styling from there. Other times, we choose from a very limited set of unordered list markers, such as disc, circle, or square; or a (much) wider range of ordered list markers. We might even, from time to time, supply the URL of an image to be used.

But what if we want to style the markers differently than the contents of the list items? That’s always been difficult at best. Now, thanks to the ::marker pseudo-element, it’s a whole lot easier. You don’t get the full range of CSS to apply to the markers, but there’s still a great deal that can be done.

::marker is available in Firefox and, thanks to work by Igalia, Chrome as well.

Consider this list:

By default, that will yield an ordered list numbered from 1 to 5, using Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.), each followed by a dot (period), all of which will match the text contents in font face, size, style, color, and so on.

If you had a design direction that required making the numbers smaller or a different color, you’d have to manually create that effect by suppressing the markers and using the ::before pseudo-element and CSS counters and negative text indenting and… well, it would take a scientist to explain it all.

Enter ::marker. Add these styles to the above list, and you’ll get the result shown after.

That’s all you need!

Before you go tearing off to rewrite all your CSS, though, beware: the properties you can apply via ::marker are fairly limited at the moment. As of February 2021, the properties that markers should recognize are:

  • All font properties (font-face, font-size, etc.)
  • The white-space property
  • The color property
  • The internationalization properties text-combine-upright, unicode-bidi, and direction
  • The content property
  • All animation and transition properties

There are some additions in some browsers, but almost all of the additions relate to text styling, not the box model. So if you were thinking you could put all your list numbers into circles with shaded backgrounds, ::marker won’t get you there—you’ll have to return to the hackfest of ::before generated content. For now, anyway: the specification explicitly says more properties may be permitted for ::marker in the future.

There’s also a limitation around white-space, which has rendering bugs in varying browsers. Chrome, for example, treats all whitespace in markers as white-space: pre as the specification says, but won’t let you change it. This should be fixed when Chrome’s LayoutNG (Next Generation) ships, but not until then. Firefox, on the other hand, ignores any white-space values, and treats whitespace like normal-flow text by default.

With those limits in mind, you can still jazz up your markers with the content property. Instead of numbers followed by a period, you can put each number in brackets with a combination of counters and strings.

Note the space after the closing bracket in the content value. That’s included to provide a little bit of space between the marker and the list content. Ordinarily you might think to use a marking or padding, but as we saw earlier, those properties can’t be applied with ::marker. Which is frustrating! Also note the CSS counter list-item. That wasn’t defined anywhere else in the CSS—it’s a built-in counter that all browsers (that understand CSS counters) use to count list items, like those in ordered lists. You can use it in your CSS as well!

If all you want to do is change the text content of a list marker and don’t care about changing any of its styles, you can do that with ::marker, or you can do it with the new cross-browser support for string values on the list-style-type property.

li.warning {
  list-style-type:"⚠";
}

So that’s what’s new in the world of list markers. It might not be something you need to do often, but if you ever do, it’s good to know that the capabilities in this area have increased, and stand to be even better in the future. Let us know if you come up with some clever markers!


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#184: Inside & Aligned Lists https://css-tricks.com/video-screencasts/184-inside-aligned-lists/ Tue, 05 May 2020 22:08:33 +0000 https://css-tricks.com/?page_id=307922 The fact that lists render their markers outside their own box (by default) is slightly weird. Any hidden overflow or overhanging off the edge of the browser will hide them. Moving them inside the box feels better and safer, but …


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The fact that lists render their markers outside their own box (by default) is slightly weird. Any hidden overflow or overhanging off the edge of the browser will hide them. Moving them inside the box feels better and safer, but doing it that the easy way means losing the really nice alignment we got for free with outside list markers. We want it both ways! Let’s do that with our own custom counters, CSS grid (with subgrid), and some more friends along the way.


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307922
list-style https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/l/list-style/ https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/l/list-style/#comments Tue, 06 Sep 2011 03:48:05 +0000 http://css-tricks.com/?page_id=14067 The list-style property is a shorthand property that sets values for three different list-related properties in one declaration:

ul {
  list-style: <list-style-type|| <list-style-position|| <list-style-image;
}

Here’s an example of the syntax:

ul {
  list-style: square outside none;


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The list-style property is a shorthand property that sets values for three different list-related properties in one declaration:

ul {
  list-style: <list-style-type> || <list-style-position> || <list-style-image>;
}

Here’s an example of the syntax:

ul {
  list-style: square outside none;
}

Which would be the same as the following longhand version:

ul {
  list-style-type: square;
  list-style-position: outside;
  list-style-image: none;
}

In the shorthand, if any values are omitted, they will revert to their initial state.

Values for list-style-type

The list-style-type property defines the type of list by setting the content of each marker, or bullet, on the list. Acceptable keyword values for list-style-type include:

  • disc
  • circle
  • square
  • decimal
  • decimal-leading-zero
  • lower-roman
  • upper-roman
  • lower-greek
  • lower-latin
  • upper-latin
  • armenian
  • georgian
  • lower-alpha
  • upper-alpha
  • none

MDN has a more complete list. Non-keyword values were introduced in CSS3, and are starting to see some support, like:

ul {
  list-style-type: "→";
}

The following demo includes a group of unordered lists to demonstrate each keyword value:

The list-style-type property applies to all lists, and to any element that is set to display: list-item.

The color of the list marker will be whatever the computed color of the element is (set via the color property).

Values for list-style-position

The list-style-position property defines where to position the list marker, and it accepts one of two values: inside or outside. These are demonstrated below with the padding removed from the lists and a left red border added:

Values for list-style-image

The list-style-image property determines whether the list marker is set with an image, and accepts a value of “none” or a URL that points to the image:

ul {
  list-style-image: url(images/bullet.png);
}

More Demos

Browser support

IEEdgeFirefoxChromeSafariOpera
YesYesYesYesWorksWorks
Android ChromeAndroid FirefoxAndroid BrowseriOS SafariOpera Mobile
YesYesYesYesWorks
Source: caniuse

Internet Explorer 6 and 7 don’t support all the keyword values for list-style-type and also have a bug where floated list items do not display their list marker. This is resolved by using a background image (instead of list-style-image) on the list items.

More information


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