Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Simple CSS Hover Tab

Update: The original edit of this post and demo file didn’t work in IE6/7. See the comments for my quick explanation of the fix (the demo now works in FF2/3, Safari 2/3, Opera 9, and IE6/7).

After throwing together a quick little hover/tab widget for my previous article, I thought I’d share how it was made, in case you find a need for it someday.

Bulletproof lists

The widget in question is just a simple unordered list, with each list item containing an anchor and an image—we want the images in this case because I want them to display in my RSS feed and for anyone who can’t (or chooses not to) view the styled version of this site.

Note: Feel free to reference images in the stylesheet rather than inline if that suits your purposes.

See the widget in use in my previous article, or check out this demo.

The code

First, the markup (with URLs truncated to save trees):

  
One 
  
Two 
  
Three 

Simple, uncluttered, uncomplicated.

Next, the CSS:

ul#hover-tab-thingy {
  position:relative;
  padding:0;
  width:500px;
  height:498px; }
#hover-tab-thingy li {
  float:left;
  list-style:none; }
#hover-tab-thingy li a {
  float:left;
  padding:9px 21px;
  background-color:#eee;
  color:#999;
  font-size:9px;
  text-align:center;
  text-transform:uppercase;
  border-right:1px solid #fff; }
#hover-tab-thingy li a:hover {
  background-color:#f60;
  color:#fff; }
li#one a,
li#one a:hover {
  background-color:#e5e5e5;
  color:#555; }
#hover-tab-thingy li a img {
  position:absolute;
  left:0;
  top:30px;
  width:500px;
  height:460px;
  clear:left;
  margin-left:-9999px;
  padding:1px;
  border:3px solid #e5e5e5; }
li#one a img,
#hover-tab-thingy li a:hover img {
  margin-left:0; }
li#two a:hover img,
li#three a:hover img {
  border-color:#f60; }

This is all fairly straightforward, so here are the highlights that may help when duplicating this on your own:

1. The entire idea is that you have tabs that are each associated with content (images in this case) which are made visible when the user hovers over the tab. There are more things you could do with this, but that’s your job, grasshopper.
2. The tabs are floated; the content elements (img in this case) clear the floats.
3. The content elements are set to position:absolute, so they can appear in the same location for each tab. To accomplish this, the ul is set to position:relative (in short: an absolutely positioned element will be positioned relative to its nearest positioned ancestor—see Doug Bowman’s great write up for more), and it’s probably a good idea if the dimensions of your ul (the container for your content) have a lot in common with those of your content elements.
4. IE6 has a problem reverting elements that set display:block on :hover to their original state (e.g. display:none). To counter this, use a negative left margin as the default positioning, and then set margin-left:0; on the hover state, which works in all modern browsers.
5. The width and height is specific to my example (the dimensions of the images I used), ditto for the padding on the tabs and the top positioning on the img elements (to push them below the tabs). Bend them to your will.

Wrap-up

This may be something that you’ll find use for on a regular basis—one of those tiny snippets of reusable “stuff” that you’ll be glad you don’t have to type every time.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008.

Categories:

• CSS

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