<menu>: The Menu element
Baseline Widely available
This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.
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
<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 also accepts the global attributes.
compactDeprecated-
This Boolean attribute hints that the list should be rendered in a compact style. The interpretation of this attribute is browser-specific. Use CSS instead: to give a similar effect as the
compactattribute, the CSS propertyline-heightcan be used with a value of80%.
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> represents a toolbar containing commands that the user can perform or activate.
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
| 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 # the-menu-element |