The Five Simple Steps website has a responsive design with a neat feature. When the browser window is narrow, the menu in the upper right converts from a regular row of links into a dropdown menu.
When you're on a small screen (iPhone shown here) and click the dropdown, you get an interface to select an option where each option is nice and big and easy to choose.
HTML Code version:
HTML code for these two menus is different. As far as I know, you can't style<select> and <option> elements to look and behave like <a>s or vice versa. So we need both. You could just put both in the markup. That's what Five Simple Steps does:
The CSS:
By default we'll hide the select menu withdisplay: none;. This is actually good for accessibility, as it will hide the redundant menu from screen readers.
Then using media queries, we'll do the switcheroo at some specific width. You can determine that on your own (here's some standard breakpoints).
But now you gotta maintain two menus?
Well yeah, that's one concern. Maybe your menus are created dynamically and you can't control the output easily. Maybe you and hand crafting menus but want to make sure you don't accidentally get your menus out of sync. One way we can fight this is to dynamically create the dropdown menu from the original.Using jQuery, we can do that with just a few lines of code:
