CSS dynamic horizontal navigation menu to fill up specific width (table behavior)

Question

I need to create a horizontal navigation menu with a changing number of items (this is important - I can't hard-code widths into the CSS and I don't want to calculate them with JS) that fill up to a certain width, let's say 800px.

With tables,

<table width="800" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
  <tr>
    <td>One</td>
    <td>Two</td>
    <td>Three</td>
    <td>Four</td>
    <td>Five Seven</td>
  </tr>
</table>

<style>
table td {
      padding: 5px 0;
      margin: 0;
      background: #fdd;
      border: 1px solid #f00;
      text-align: center;
    }
</style>

Note that longer items take up more space and I can add items into the HTML without changing anything in CSS and the menu items shrink to accommodate additional items - the whole menu never being shorter or longer than 800px.

As a menu isn't a semantically correct use of a table, can this be done with say a list and pure CSS?

Answer 1

In browsers that support the table display CSS rules, yes:

<style>
  nav {display:table; width:800px; background:yellow}
  ul {display:table-row; }
  li {display:table-cell; border:1px solid red}
</style>

<nav>
 <ul>
  <li>One</li>
  <li>Two</li>
  <li>Three</li>
  <li>Four</li>
  <li>Five Seven</li>
 </ul>
</nav>

Basically, you'd have to build a token table. In action: http://jsbin.com/urisa4

Otherwise: no, not if you can't compromise your requirements.

Answer 2

You could do something like this:

<style type="text/css">
#container { width: 800px ; border: 1px dashed #333; }
#container div { width: inherit; display: table-cell; background: #ccc}
</style>

<div id="container">
    <div>Something</div>
    <div>Something</div>
    <div>Something</div>
</div>  

That way it fills up what you want, but can grow to a lot of items.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

The only way to do this with CSS is to hard-code the width of the li elements (assuming you'd be using the following structure):

  <ul>
    <li>One</li>
    <li>Two</li>
    <li>Three</li>
    <li>Four</li>
    <li>Five Seven</li>
  </ul>

ul {
    width: 80%; /* or whatever */
}

ul li {
    width: 16%;
    padding: 1%;
}

JS Fiddle demo.

This leaves, potentially, an 'unused' 10% (to be used for margin or additional padding).

At some point in the future css calculations might be able to perform this more fluidly.

Answer 4

This works, but i don´t think you want some think like this :)

<div class="master">
    <ul>
        <li>test1</li>
        <li>test2</li>
        <li>aölsdkfaösdlfk</li>
        <li>yeah baby</li>
        <li>hi</li>
    </ul>
</div>

.master {
   width:800px;
   background-color:black;
   height:100px;
   color:white;
    display:table;
}
table {
 width:100%;   
}

ul {
 display:table-row;  
 width:100%; 
}
li {
 display:table-cell;  
 width:auto; 
 margin:1px;
 border:1px solid white;
 background-color:red;
 text-align:center;
    vertical-align:middle;
}

http://jsfiddle.net/UnNyS/