The ‘nav’ abstraction

Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.

This post comes in a similar vein to Nicole Sullivan’s genius The media object saves hundreds of lines of code.

An abstraction is basically removing a pattern from a specific idea and making a more generic idea out of it. That is to say, rather than writing the same similar patterns over and over, create a single more generic representation of those patterns and reuse that instead.

Nicole does this with her media block by taking a series of similarly constructed but different components and sharing their common aspects in a more generic way. This is a really sensible and useful abstraction whereby she can make a pretty much infinite amount of pretty different blocks of content using only the same handful of lines of CSS each time. Genius!

Her media block abstraction is a pretty common one, and one I’ve used myself. Today I’m going to share another abstraction that may well be even more common and hopefully just as handy; the nav abstraction.

I’m sure you’ve had loads of projects where you’ve had a horizontal nav, and also maybe a breadcrumb trail and possibly a list of logos that go in a banner-style list…?

If this is the case then I also imagine you might have written something like:

#nav{
  list-style:none;
  margin-left:0;
}
#nav li{
  display:inline;
}
#nav a{
  ...
  [styles]
  ...
}


.breadcrumb{
  list-style:none;
  margin-left:0;
}
.breadcrumb li{
  display:inline;
}
.breadcrumb a{
  ...
  [styles]
  ...
}


.sponsors{
  list-style:none;
  margin-left:0;
}
.sponsors li{
  display:inline;
}
.sponsors a{
  ...
  [styles]
  ...
}

Here we can see that, although we’re building three different things, we’re reusing quite a few repeated patterns to create similar looking things. We need an abstraction.

The nav abstraction

Now, I’m not sure whether nav is actually the best word to use; these three examples are all types of navigational constructs, but that’s more coincidence than anything else. As such I encourage you to please offer up your alternative recommendations in the comments, please!

What we need to do now is take out the shared patterns and create a fourth class of .nav:

.nav{
    list-style:none;
    margin-left:0;
}
    .nav > li,
        .nav > li > a{
            display:inline-block;
           *display:inline;
            zoom:1;
    }

Here we define our abstraction. We take the repeated bits and make the most granular construct we can. Notice that we give both list items and links display:inline-block;, and include the IE7 hack to force elements to act like inline-block if they do not naturally support it.

This will throw any list into a very basic/crude horizontal series of links which we can then extend to adopt more specific styles, like so:

.nav{
    list-style:none;
    margin-left:0;
}
    .nav > li,
        .nav > li > a{
            display:inline-block;
           *display:inline;
            zoom:1;
    }


.site-nav{
    width:100%;
    background:#eee;
}
        .site-nav a{
            padding:5px 10px;
        }


.breadcrumb{}
    .breadcrumb li:before{
        content:"» "
    }
    .breadcrumb li:first-child:before{
        content:normal;
    }


.sponsors{
  text-align:center;
}

Using a base abstraction and then extending it we can create our breadcrumb with this HTML:

<ol class="nav  breadcrumb">
    <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
    <li><a href="/about/">About</a></li>
    <li><a href="/about/us/">About us</a></li>
</ol>

Writing abstractions gives smaller CSS, removes unnecessary repetitions and makes simple elements of your design much more reusable. Nice!

Did this help? We can do way more!