If you don’t know html data attributes, check this article. Each option has data-value attribute, which value represents option’s value. Aesthetics often matter in web design and this flat select menu is a great. This way you never see the select an option text anywhere in the dropdown menu. An option field is hidden by default whenever the user picks a choice. content is an HTML-Entity which will produce a nice downwards facing arrow for us. It’s fully compliant and works with the actual HTML select element. We can use ul and li elements or div with span elements. Since we cannot use select tag, we have more options for choosing html structure. Notice how as you select the text a background color fills the space You can change the background color and color of selected text by styling ::selection.Styling this pseudo element is great for matching user-selected text to your sites color scheme. Traditionally, when you need to create a custom select dropdown, you would use the following structure. Here you can see default select element, which can look a bit different depending on the browser you are using. For more information, check Advanced Select Dropdown. If dropdown has thousands of options you should use “windowing” technique. If you need a dropdown with hundreds of options, you should provide users a search feature. In both cases, you would need to use a third-party library, because own implementation can take a lot of time. Will select dropdown have hundreds or thousands of options? You can apply styling to select options and add custom components there.īefore you start making custom select dropdown, you should ask the following questions: In this blog post, I want to share with you, how you can build functional select dropdown without using any libraries and frameworks. Many times, you don’t need to use any libraries or frameworks, because in many cases, creating a custom select dropdown is an easy task. They have proven cross-browser functionality and are highly reliable. Styling multiple selection menu control options (option elements) with CSSThis demo page is related to the article Styling form controls with CSS, revisited.For more info on the purpose of this page, please read the article. You can find various javascript libraries and css frameworks, which have own implementation for custom select dropdowns. Nowadays, select dropdowns appear in many different variations.
Native HTML select element doesn’t allow us styling option tags. Unfortunately, styling select dropdown is not so straightforward. “Why do I need to create a custom select dropdown component, if there is already HTML select tag? I can apply some css styling and that’s it!” Select dropdown allows the user to choose one value from a predefined list. Should you build it from scratch or use a third-party library?Ĭreating custom select dropdown component is one of the most common requirements in web development.
#Change select options into button text html css how to
A post on how to create a custom select dropdown using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.