Version 1.5.2
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A project by Mark Root-Wiley, MRW Web Design
Clicky Menus lets you create a progressively enhanced, accessible one-level dropdown menu that opens when activated by click, touch, or ENTER/SPACE. The menu supports hover and keyboard navigation when JS is not enabled.
Why should you want menus that work this way? Read the accompanying article on CSS Tricks, "In Praise of the Unambiguous Click Menu".
Tip
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- Supports interaction with mouse, touch, and keyboard
- Converts parent menu items from links into buttons
- Automatic
aria-expanded,aria-controlsandaria-hiddensupport - Close open submenu with
ESCkey - Close open submenu with click outside of open menu
- Basic offscreen-menu prevention
- Configure custom submenu selector
- Close open submenus with a button
This script only supports a single level of submenus, i.e., there are no "sub-sub-menus" or "tertiary menus". This is intentional because:
- I don't like them. Nested dropdowns are a "navigation smell"—a la "code smell"—and can often be avoided for better results.
- This makes it very easy to make "mega menus" that contain nested lists (basically permanently visible sub-submenus menus).
If you really want this feature, there's an open issue for sharing use cases. If you want to submit a pull request, please coordinate on that issue before doing any work!
Clicky Menus requires one JS file, one CSS file, and a list with the class clicky-menu.
You can install Clicky Menus by copying and pasting the files into your project. You can also use git or npm.
With git:
$ git clone https://github.com/mrwweb/clicky-menus.git
With npm:
$ npm install clicky-menus
Once you have the files:
- Load
clicky-menus.jsanywhere in the DOM andclicky-menus.cssin the<head>. - Put the
clicky-menuandno-jsclasses on the top-level<ul>element containing your menu - Style your menus however you like.
clicky-menus.cssprovides the most minimal styles for menu functionality so you can customize the design to your liking. See the demo for one example of how you could style this, including submenu animations!
Most of the time, Clicky Menus requires no configuration!
If you have unusual markup or design requirements, you can set a custom selector to target submenu elements. Do this by adding a data-clicky-submenu-selector attribute on the top-level <ul> element (the same one with the clicky-menu class) that contains a valid CSS selector.
For example, if you only want to only select the first level of nested <ul> elements while building a megamenu, you would do:
<ul class="clicky-menu" data-clicky-submenu-selector=".clicky-menu > li > ul">
<!-- menu items -->
</ul>There are a variety of situations where you might want to force submenus to close based on interactions elsewhere on the page. For example, maybe an adjacent search toggle overlaps with submenus when expanded.
To close all open submenus, dispatch the custom event clickyMenusClose to the .clicky-menu DOM node (usually the <ul> containing menu items).
Where my-menu is the ID of the menu you want to close and is the element with the clicky-menu class:
<button data-clicky-menus-close="my-menu">Close Open Submenus</button><button id="close-open-submenus">Close Open Submenus</button>// select the menu to manipulate
const myMenu = document.getElementById('my-menu');
// the element that triggers the close event
const closeButton = document.getElementById('close-open-submenus');
// dispatch the custom event when clicking the button
closeButton.addEventListener('click', () => {
myMenu.dispatchEvent( new Event( 'clickyMenusClose' );
});<nav id="primary-nav"><!-- menu parent element must have an ID -->
<ul class="clicky-menu no-js">
<li>
<a href="#" class="a-custom-class">Parent Menu Item 1</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="page-1a.html">Submenu Item 1a</a></li>
<li><a href="page-1b.html">Submenu Item 1b</a></li>
<li><a href="page-1c.html">Submenu Item 1c</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<!-- etc… -->
</ul>
</nav>Once the script runs, the markup is changed to:
<nav id="primary-nav"> <!-- element must have an ID -->
<ul class="clicky-menu no-js">
<li>
<button aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="parent-menu-item-1-submenu" class="a-custom-class">Parent Menu Item 1</button>
<ul id="parent-menu-item-1-submenu" aria-hidden="true">
<li><a href="page-1a.html">Submenu Item 1a</a></li>
<li><a href="page-1b.html">Submenu Item 1b</a></li>
<li><a href="page-1c.html">Submenu Item 1c</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<!-- etc… -->
</ul>
</nav>- All attributes on links converted to buttons are retained except for
href. - All elements inside links converted to buttons, such as an SVG icon, are retained in the button.
- When a user clicks a submenu toggle button (i.e., parent menu item),
aria-expandedandaria-hiddenare appropriately toggled betweentrueandfalse.
All Modern Browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Safari.
Internet Explorer 11 support is possible if you include polyfills for closest and NodeList.forEach and transpile your code with something like Babel.
- Resolve issue since 1.2.0 where replaced parent link attributes were not correctly transfered to the button. Closes #27
- Make sure scripts works fully when loaded in the
<head>
- Change
ESCkey event handler to fire onkeydowninstead ofkeyupand use.preventDefault()instead of.stopPropogation()when focus is inside a submenu or parent of open submenu. This will prevent theESCkey from closingdialogelements when a clicky-menu is inside one. - Note: v1.5.1 is identical to v1.5.0. Published to NPM to ensure latest version is used after adding v1.4.0 and v1.3.0 to NPM registry.
- Further differentiate automatically-generated submenu IDs by including a unique ID for each clicky-menu.
- NEW! Use the
data-clicky-menus-closeattribute on any element to automatically close the open submenu. It should be set to the ID of the element with theclicky-menuclass. Fixes #21. - Don't let
ESCpropogate when pressed on an item inside a submenu. This should generally prevent dialogs and other toggle features from closing when they contain a menu. Fixes #22 - Strip special characters from automatically generated submenu IDs and add an increment (e.g.
-1) to the end of each ID to get much closer to guaranteeing it is unique. Fixes #12
- You can now close open submenus from 3rd-party JS with the
clickyMenusCloseevent - The default CSS will now correctly position submenus relative to the parent list item
- Add support for data attribute that sets custom submenu selector
- Fix mismatched variable name leading to broken submenu IDs
- Improve documentation in the readme
- It's alive!