: The Menu element - HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN (original) (raw)

Baseline

Widely available

The <menu> HTML element is described in the HTML specification as a semantic alternative to

Try it

<div class="news">
  <a href="#">NASA’s Webb Delivers Deepest Infrared Image of Universe Yet</a>
  <menu>
    <li><button id="save">Save for later</button></li>
    <li><button id="share">Share this news</button></li>
  </menu>
</div>

.news {
  background-color: bisque;
  padding: 1em;
  border: solid thin black;
}

menu {
  list-style-type: none;
  display: flex;
  padding: 0;
  margin-bottom: 0;
  gap: 1em;
}

Attributes

This element only includes the global attributes.

Usage notes

The <menu> and

**Note:**In early versions of the HTML specification, the <menu> element had an additional use case as a context menu. This functionality is considered obsolete and is not in the specification.

Examples

Toolbar

In this example, a <menu> is used to create a toolbar for an editing application.

HTML

<menu>
  <li><button onclick="copy()">Copy</button></li>
  <li><button onclick="cut()">Cut</button></li>
  <li><button onclick="paste()">Paste</button></li>
</menu>

Note that this is functionally no different from:

<ul>
  <li><button onclick="copy()">Copy</button></li>
  <li><button onclick="cut()">Cut</button></li>
  <li><button onclick="paste()">Paste</button></li>
</ul>

CSS

menu,
ul {
  display: flex;
  list-style: none;
  padding: 0;
  width: 400px;
}

li {
  flex-grow: 1;
}

button {
  width: 100%;
}

Result

Technical summary