Hamburger menu with no JS

I put together this short tutorial on how to make a hamburger menu with no js in response to the feedback on my original Twitter post. The trick is t

JC Lee

4 years ago

2 min read

I put together this short tutorial on how to make a hamburger menu with no js in response to the feedback on my original Twitter post.

The trick is to use the CSS pseudo-class :target. I'm not the one who came up with that technique - saw it on stackOverflow or elsewhere.

Anyway, enjoy 😁!

:target

Have you heard of the CSS pseudo-class on :target?

It styles the element with an anchor id that that has been called by a link.

For example, a p with an id of home and an a link with href=#home:

<p id="home">Home</p>
<a href="#home">Go to Home</a>

p:target {
  color: red;
}

When we click on the a link, the text of the targeted p changes to red.

By clicking on another link, the :target style gets hidden.

<p id="home">Home</p>
<a href="#home">Go to Home</a>
<a href="#">Go somewhere else</a>

Here's the whole html code.

I'm using material icons by adding their cdn in the head of the html file.

<head>
  <!-- ... -->
  <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons" rel="stylesheet">
</head>

<body>
  <!-- ... -->
  <ul class="menu" id="menu">
    <li><a href="#">Home</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Profile</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">About</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Contacts</a></li>
    <a class="close" href="#">
    <span class="material-icons">
      close
    </span>
    </a>
  </ul>
  <a class="hamburger" href="#menu">
    <span class="material-icons">
      menu
    </span>
  </a>
</body>

Material icons work by defining a span with material-icons class and adding a keyword between the tags:

 <span class="material-icons">
    close
  </span>

The ul has an id of menu. It holds the menu and the close icon link.
The a with a class of hamburger has a href #menu, clicking on it will show the on :target style for the ul menu.
Clicking on other links (Home, Profile, About, Contacts) and the close link will remove the on :target style of the ul.

Now we just need to add a sprinkle of CSS ✨.

The hamburger link has a position fixed to get it out of the flow of the page.

The menu has a position fixed too and a bigger z-index than the hamburger link to put the menu above the link.

For consistency, I've put the hamburger and close links on the same corner.

.hamburger {
  position: fixed;
  /* a large z-index puts the ham button above the rest of the page*/
  z-index: 99;
  background: white;
  border: none;
  cursor: pointer;
  top: 1rem;
  right: 1rem;
}

.menu {
  position: fixed;
  /* give the menu a larger z-index than the ham link
  to put the menu above it */
  z-index: 100;
  top: 0;
  left: 0;
  right: 0;
  bottom: 0;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100vh;
  /* basic menu styling*/
  list-style: none;
  background: black;
  display: flex;
  
  flex-direction: column;
  /* animate slide up/down */
  transform: translateY(-100%);
  transition: transform 0.2s ease;
}

.close {
  position: absolute;
  border: none;
  color: white;
  cursor: pointer;
  top: 1rem;
  right: 1rem;
}

The menu is hidden by default with transform: translateY(-100%);. Translating -100% on the Y axis moves it 100% up above the screen.

By adding a transition transition: transform 0.2s; on transform we get a small slide in and out animation when the value of transform translateY changes.

And we reset the translation Y to 0 and show the menu on :target.

.menu:target {
  /* show menu */
  transform: translateY(0);
}

Thanks for reading 😄!

Thanks Martin for telling me to animate transform instead of height to get GPU support.

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Hamburger menu with no JS - Beginners

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