CSS focus powered dropdown menu

Today we'll be making something slightly different. A full CSS powered dropdown menu!

No JavaScript required!

We will make use of a button, with a focus state we'll check if we need to show this menu.

The end result will look like this:

For this specific tutorial, I'm using Tailwind CSS to just focus more on the actual effect.

You can find my Tailwind article here.

HTML Structure

The HTML will be a navbar container, a logo and a user icon on the right.

Tailwind does the styling, and mainly focussed on using flex to align the items.

As you can see we have a button with the ID user-menu next to it we have a div with the ID user-menu-dropdown this will be the dropdown we'll show once we focus the button.

<nav class="flex items-center justify-between h-full p-3 m-auto bg-orange-200">
  <span>My Logo</span>
  <div class="relative">
    <button id="user-menu" aria-label="User menu" aria-haspopup="true">
        <img class="w-8 h-8 rounded-full" src="https://scontent.fcpt4-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-1/p480x480/82455849_2533242576932502_5629407411459588096_o.jpg?_nc_cat=100&ccb=2&_nc_sid=7206a8&_nc_ohc=rGM_UBdnnA8AX_pGIdM&_nc_ht=scontent.fcpt4-1.fna&tp=6&oh=7de8686cebfc29e104c118fc3f78c7e5&oe=5FD1C3FE" />
    </button>
    <div id="user-menu-dropdown" class="absolute right-0 w-48 mt-2 origin-top-right rounded-lg shadow-lg top-10 menu-hidden">
      <div class="p-4 bg-white rounded-md shadow-xs" role="menu" aria-orientation="vertical" aria-labelledby="user-menu">
        <a href="#" class="block px-6 py-2 mb-2 font-bold rounded" role="menuitem">My profile</a>
        <a href="#" class="block px-6 py-2 font-bold rounded" role="menuitem">Logout</a>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</nav>

CSS menu on focus

To add the effect, we need to target the focus on the button. But first, let's hide our dropdown and add a small effect.

Note: We could use @apply, but codepen doesn't support this

#user-menu ~ #user-menu-dropdown {
  transform: scaleX(0) scaleY(0);
  transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 1, 1);
  transition-duration: 75ms;
  opacity: 0;
  top: 3.25rem;
}

For the dropdown we add a transform to make it animate from the corner, then we add an opacity of 0 to hide it.

Now we need to target the hover.

We make use of the #user-menu:focus and then target the next (~) dropdown.

We also add a focus-within in case someone clicks a link in the dropdown, the menu will stay active then.

#user-menu ~ #user-menu-dropdown:focus-within,
#user-menu:focus ~ #user-menu-dropdown {
  transform: scaleX(1) scaleY(1);
  transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0, 0, 0.2, 1);
  transition-duration: 100ms;
  opacity: 1;
}

You can see the full example on this Codepen.

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