views:

46

answers:

1

Hi there,

im trying to build a simple HTML+CSS menu with submenu popups.

If a list item has a child list and gets hovered the child list would show up. This works already.

But I want the parent item to be on top of the child list. I tried it with the z-index and.. failed. The child always overlaps the parent.

I try to do this to make the popup look like this:

 ________ ________
 |Link 1| |Link 2|______
          |-> Sublink 1|
          |-> Sublink 2|
          |____________|

So parent item and child item have no visible borders between them but borders around them.

This is the HTML:

<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
 a { color: #000; }

 body { background: #444; }

 #mainlist { list-style: none; }

 #mainlist li 
 { 
  float: left; 
  margin-left: 10px;
  border-top: 1px solid black;
  border-left: 1px solid black;
  border-right: 1px solid black;
  padding: 10px;
  background: #aaa;
  display: inline;
 }

 #sublist
 { 
  background: #aaa;
  border: 1px solid black; 
  width: 100px;
  display: none; 
  position: absolute;
  list-style: none;
  margin: 0px;
  padding: 0px;
  margin-left: -11px;

 }

 #sublist li
 { 
  border: none;
  background: #aaa;
  width: 100%;
  text-align: left;
 }

 #sublist li:hover { background: #ccc; }

 #mainlist li:hover { z-index: 60; }

                /* When mainlist li is hovered show the sublist */
 #mainlist li:hover > #sublist
 { 
  z-index: 50;
  display: block; 
 }


</style>

 </head>
 <body>
  <ul id="mainlist">
   <li><a href="#">Testlink 1</a></li>
   <li><a href="#">Testlink 2</a>
    <ul id="sublist">
     <li>Test 1</li>
     <li>Test 2</li>
    </ul>
   </li>
  </ul>
 </body>
</html>
A: 

You can do it by tweaking your CSS slightly. Currently your top level <li>'s are styling your main items. There's no way to get these to appear above the #sublist because the #sublist is a child of them (you can't put a child of an element behind its parent).

The fix is to apply the top level item styles on the <a> tags. These are siblings of the #sublist and so stacking them with z-index is easy:

As a simple demonstration, add this rule to your CSS and you'll see the #sublist is now below the <a>:

#mainlist li a {
   padding: 10px;
   background: red;
   position: relative;
   z-index: 60;
}

All you have to do is transfer all the #mainlist li CSS rules to #mainlist li a.

Pat
Thanks, works great.
JohnKa