<menu>: The Menu element
The <menu>
HTML element is described in the HTML specification as a semantic alternative to <ul>
, but treated by browsers (and exposed through the accessibility tree) as no different than <ul>
. It represents an unordered list of items (which are represented by <li>
elements).
Try it
Attributes
This element only includes the global attributes.
Usage notes
The <menu>
and <ul>
elements both represent an unordered list of items. The key difference is that <ul>
primarily contains items for display, while <menu>
was intended for interactive items. The related <menuitem>
element has been deprecated.
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
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:
html
<ul>
<li><button onclick="copy()">Copy</button></li>
<li><button onclick="cut()">Cut</button></li>
<li><button onclick="paste()">Paste</button></li>
</ul>
CSS
css
menu,
ul {
display: flex;
list-style: none;
padding: 0;
width: 400px;
}
li {
flex-grow: 1;
}
button {
width: 100%;
}
Result
Technical summary
Content categories |
Flow content. If the element's children include at least one
|
---|---|
Permitted content |
Zero or more occurrences of |
Tag omission | None, both the starting and ending tag are mandatory. |
Permitted parents | Any element that accepts flow content. |
Implicit ARIA role | list |
Permitted ARIA roles |
directory , group ,
listbox , menu , menubar ,
none , presentation ,
radiogroup , tablist ,
toolbar or tree
|
DOM interface | HTMLMenuElement |
Specifications
Specification |
---|
HTML Standard # the-menu-element |
Browser compatibility
BCD tables only load in the browser