Clicky Menus Save
Simple click-triggered navigation submenus. Accessible and progressively enhanced.
Clicky Menus
Version 1.2.0
Jump to: About, Features, Setup & Configuration, Browser Support Changelog
About
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 is progressively enhanced, supporting hover and keyboard navigation (in modern browsers) if 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".
Features
- 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
Why only one level of submenu?
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 personally don't like them. They give off a bit of 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 can contain nested lists (basically permanently visible tertiary 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!
Setup & Configuration
Clicky menus requires one JS file, one CSS file, and a list with the class clicky-menu. Most of the time, Clicky Menus requires no configuration!
- Include
clicky-menus.jsanywhere in the DOM andclicky-menus.cssin the<head>. - Put the
clicky-menuclass on the top-level<ul>element containing your menu
Custom submenu selector
If you have unusual markup or design requirements, you can set a custom selector for the submenu element with a data-clicky-submenu-selector attribute on the top-level <ul> element (the same one with the clicky-menu class).
For example, if you only want to 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>
Closing submenus with JS
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).
Example:
<button id="close-open-submenus">Close Open Submenus</button>
// select the menu to manipulate
const myMenu = document.getElementById('my-menu');
// an 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' ) } );
Expected markup and markup transformation
<nav id="primary-nav"> <!-- 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>
Notes on markup transformation
- 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.
Browser Support
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.
Changelog
1.2.0 (May 21, 2024)
- 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
1.1.0 (October 19, 2023)
- Add support for data attribute that sets custom submenu selector
- Fix mismatched variable name leading to broken submenu IDs
- Improve documentation in the readme
1.0.0 (March 15, 2021)
- It's alive!
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