Jquery Select parent li a if child element active

Question

I spent hours looking for a CSS only then jQuery solution for this. I've seen this everywhere but not sure how to do one from the scratch.

What I want to do is, I have a menu as a list, and another list in it, and another. So this is a three level horizontal menu.

What I want to do is, when a child is selected, I want to change the background colour of the parent li a so it looks like breadcrumbs if you know what i mean.

This is my current css

.menu {
    z-index: 9999;
    position:relative;
    background-image: url(images/top_nav_lili_repeat.png);
    background-repeat: repeat-x; height:38px;
    font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif;
    text-transform:uppercase;
}
.menu ul ul {
    display: none;
}
.menu ul li:hover > ul {
    display: block;
}
.menu ul {

    color: #797979;
    padding: 0 0px;

    list-style: none;
    position: relative;
    display: inline-table;
}
.menu ul:after {
    content: "";
    clear: both;
    display: block;
}
.menu ul li {
    float: left;
}
.menu ul li:hover {
    background: #4b545f;
}
.menu ul li:hover a {
    color: #EBAD2D;
}
.menu li a.seleted ul li a{ background-color:#ff0000;}
.menu ul li a {
    display: block;
    padding: 11px 16px;
    color: #bbb;
    text-decoration: none;
}
.menu ul li a.selected { background-color:#ff0000;}

.menu ul ul {
    background: #5f6975;
    border-radius: 0px;
    padding: 0;
    position: absolute;
    top: 100%;
    width: 200px;
}
.menu ul ul li {
    float: none;
    border-top: 1px solid #6b727c;
    border-bottom: 1px solid #575f6a;
    position: relative;
}
.menu ul ul li a {
    padding: 10px 16px;
    color: #fff;
}
.menu ul ul li a:hover {
    background: #4b545f;
}
.menu ul ul ul {
    position: absolute;
    left: 100%;
    top: 0;
}

and my current HTML menu looks like this.

<div class="menu">

            <ul>
    <li><a href="#" title="Menu Item 1">Home</a>
        <ul>
            <li><a href="#" title="Sub-Menu Item 1">Home link 1</a>
                <ul>
                    <li><a href="#" title="Sub-Sub-Menu Item 1">Home Link 1 Link 1</a></li>
                    <li><a href="#" title="Sub-Sub-Menu Item 2">Home Link 1 Link 2</a></li>
                    <li><a href="#" title="Sub-Sub-Menu Item 3">Home Link 1 Link 3</a></li>
                </ul>
            </li>
            <li><a href="#" title="Sub-Menu Item 2">About</a>
                <ul>
                    <li><a href="#" title="Sub-Sub-Menu Item 1">About 1</a></li>
                    <li><a href="#" title="Sub-Sub-Menu Item 2">About 2</a></li>
                    <li><a href="#" title="Sub-Sub-Menu Item 3">About 3</a></li>
                </ul>
            </li>
            <li><a href="#" title="Sub-Menu Item 3">Contact</a>
                <ul>
                    <li><a href="#" title="Sub-Sub-Menu Item 1">Contact 1</a></li>
                    <li><a href="#" title="Sub-Sub-Menu Item 2">Contact 2</a></li>
                    <li><a  class="selected" href="#" title="Sub-Sub-Menu Item 3">Contact 3</a></li>
                </ul>
            </li>
        </ul>
    </li>

</ul>
          </div>

If you look at the last li a Contact 3 I have a class attached to it as selected, my CMS will add this class to the selected element. So What I want to do is change the background colour of the parent <a>Contact</a> and the <a>Home</a> with css or Jquery and I want this to crossbrowser compatible too. Thanks heaps guys.

Heres a fiddle : http://jsfiddle.net/8s3Bc/

Answer 1

All you need is to select anchor with the selected class, and iterate it's li parents to change their background.

In the following statement, I added parent class for parent li elements.

$('.menu li a.selected').parents('li').addClass('parent');​

And i defined background color for parent class.

.parent {
   background-color:#ff0000;
}

Here is the working example: http://jsfiddle.net/dhMSN/