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clicky-menus
clicky-menus/clicky-menus.js

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Readme

Clicky Menus

Version 1.5.2

Jump to: About, Features, Setup & Configuration, Browser Support Changelog

About

A project by Mark Root-Wiley, MRW Web Design

Clicky Menus lets you create a progressively enhanced, accessible one-level dropdown menu that opens when activated by click, touch, or ENTER/SPACE. The menu supports hover and keyboard navigation when JS is not enabled.

Demo on CodePen

Why should you want menus that work this way? Read the accompanying article on CSS Tricks, "In Praise of the Unambiguous Click Menu".

[!TIP] Did this save you an hour? Did this save you four hours? Consider sponsoring my work on the project!

Features

Supports interaction with mouse, touch, and keyboard
Converts parent menu items from links into buttons
Automatic aria-expanded, aria-controls and aria-hidden support
Close open submenu with ESC key
Close open submenu with click outside of open menu
Basic offscreen-menu prevention
Configure custom submenu selector
Close open submenus with a button

Why only one level of submenu?

This script only supports a single level of submenus, i.e., there are no "sub-sub-menus" or "tertiary menus". This is intentional because:

I don't like them. Nested dropdowns are a "navigation smell"—a la "code smell"—and can often be avoided for better results.
This makes it very easy to make "mega menus" that contain nested lists (basically permanently visible sub-submenus menus).

If you really want this feature, there's an open issue for sharing use cases. If you want to submit a pull request, please coordinate on that issue before doing any work!

Setup & Configuration

Clicky Menus requires one JS file, one CSS file, and a list with the class clicky-menu.

Installation

You can install Clicky Menus by copying and pasting the files into your project. You can also use git or npm.

With git:

$ git clone https://github.com/mrwweb/clicky-menus.git

With npm:

$ npm install clicky-menus

Once you have the files:

Load clicky-menus.js anywhere in the DOM and clicky-menus.css in the <head>.
Put the clicky-menu and no-js classes on the top-level <ul> element containing your menu
Style your menus however you like. clicky-menus.css provides the most minimal styles for menu functionality so you can customize the design to your liking. See the demo for one example of how you could style this, including submenu animations!

Most of the time, Clicky Menus requires no configuration!

Custom submenu selector

If you have unusual markup or design requirements, you can set a custom selector to target submenu elements. Do this by adding a data-clicky-submenu-selector attribute on the top-level <ul> element (the same one with the clicky-menu class) that contains a valid CSS selector.

For example, if you only want to only select the first level of nested <ul> elements while building a megamenu, you would do:

<ul class="clicky-menu" data-clicky-submenu-selector=".clicky-menu > li > ul">
    <!-- menu items -->
</ul>

Closing open submenus with data attribute or custom JavaScript event

There are a variety of situations where you might want to force submenus to close based on interactions elsewhere on the page. For example, maybe an adjacent search toggle overlaps with submenus when expanded.

To close all open submenus, dispatch the custom event clickyMenusClose to the .clicky-menu DOM node (usually the <ul> containing menu items).

With data attribute

Where my-menu is the ID of the menu you want to close and is the element with the clicky-menu class:

<button data-clicky-menus-close="my-menu">Close Open Submenus</button>

With custom JavaScript event

<button id="close-open-submenus">Close Open Submenus</button>

// select the menu to manipulate
const myMenu = document.getElementById('my-menu');

// the element that triggers the close event
const closeButton = document.getElementById('close-open-submenus');

// dispatch the custom event when clicking the button
closeButton.addEventListener('click', () => {
    myMenu.dispatchEvent( new Event( 'clickyMenusClose' );
});

Expected markup and markup transformation

<nav id="primary-nav"><!-- menu parent element must have an ID -->
 <ul class="clicky-menu no-js">
  <li>
   <a href="#" class="a-custom-class">Parent Menu Item 1</a>
   <ul>
    <li><a href="page-1a.html">Submenu Item 1a</a></li>
    <li><a href="page-1b.html">Submenu Item 1b</a></li>
    <li><a href="page-1c.html">Submenu Item 1c</a></li>
   </ul>
  </li>
  <!-- etc… -->
 </ul>
</nav>

Once the script runs, the markup is changed to:

<nav id="primary-nav"> <!-- element must have an ID -->
 <ul class="clicky-menu no-js">
  <li>
   <button aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="parent-menu-item-1-submenu" class="a-custom-class">Parent Menu Item 1</button>
   <ul id="parent-menu-item-1-submenu" aria-hidden="true">
    <li><a href="page-1a.html">Submenu Item 1a</a></li>
    <li><a href="page-1b.html">Submenu Item 1b</a></li>
    <li><a href="page-1c.html">Submenu Item 1c</a></li>
   </ul>
  </li>
  <!-- etc… -->
 </ul>
</nav>

Notes on markup transformation

All attributes on links converted to buttons are retained except for href.
All elements inside links converted to buttons, such as an SVG icon, are retained in the button.
When a user clicks a submenu toggle button (i.e., parent menu item), aria-expanded and aria-hidden are appropriately toggled between true and false.

Browser Support

All Modern Browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Safari.

Internet Explorer 11 support is possible if you include polyfills for closest and NodeList.forEach and transpile your code with something like Babel.

Changelog

1.5.2 (October 30, 2025)

Resolve issue since 1.2.0 where replaced parent link attributes were not correctly transfered to the button. Closes #27
Make sure scripts works fully when loaded in the <head>

1.5.0 / 1.5.1 (May 27, 2025)

Change ESC key event handler to fire on keydown instead of keyup and use .preventDefault() instead of .stopPropogation() when focus is inside a submenu or parent of open submenu. This will prevent the ESC key from closing dialog elements when a clicky-menu is inside one.
Note: v1.5.1 is identical to v1.5.0. Published to NPM to ensure latest version is used after adding v1.4.0 and v1.3.0 to NPM registry.

1.4.0 (April 29, 2025)

Further differentiate automatically-generated submenu IDs by including a unique ID for each clicky-menu.

1.3.0 (April 25, 2025)

NEW! Use the data-clicky-menus-close attribute on any element to automatically close the open submenu. It should be set to the ID of the element with the clicky-menu class. Fixes #21.
Don't let ESC propogate when pressed on an item inside a submenu. This should generally prevent dialogs and other toggle features from closing when they contain a menu. Fixes #22
Strip special characters from automatically generated submenu IDs and add an increment (e.g. -1) to the end of each ID to get much closer to guaranteeing it is unique. Fixes #12

1.2.0 (May 21, 2024)

You can now close open submenus from 3rd-party JS with the clickyMenusClose event
The default CSS will now correctly position submenus relative to the parent list item

1.1.0 (October 19, 2023)

Add support for data attribute that sets custom submenu selector
Fix mismatched variable name leading to broken submenu IDs
Improve documentation in the readme

1.0.0 (March 15, 2021)

It's alive!

clicky-menus