I ran across this 30 seconds of code website the other day, and they have a CSS section which is really good! The first example snippet I looked at was this “floating section headers” example, reminding me yet again how satisfying definition lists can be.
With nice simple HTML like this:
<div class="floating-stack">
<dl>
<dt>A</dt>
<dd>Algeria</dd>
<dd>Angola</dd>
<dt>B</dt>
<dd>Benin</dd>
<dd>Botswana</dd>
<dd>Burkina Faso</dd>
<dd>Burundi</dd>
<dt>C</dt>
<dd>Cabo Verde</dd>
<dd>Cameroon</dd>
<dd>Central African Republic</dd>
<dd>Chad</dd>
<dd>Comoros</dd>
<dd>Congo, Democratic Republic of the</dd>
<dd>Congo, Republic of the</dd>
<dd>Cote d'Ivoire</dd>
<dt>D</dt>
<dd>Djibouti</dd>
<dt>E</dt>
<dd>Egypt</dd>
<dd>Equatorial Guinea</dd>
<dd>Eritrea</dd>
<dd>Eswatini (formerly Swaziland)</dd>
<dd>Ethiopia</dd>
</dl>
</div>The default browser styling — no CSS at all — looks like this:
So, each of those <dt>s, in this case, happen to be nicely tucked away to the left in the space that the margin-inline-start makes for the <dd>s. Which means that in extremely little CSS we can kick on that “stick sections” concept:
dt {
position: sticky;
top: 0;
background: white;
display: inline-block;
}I love the simplicity of that.
And now that the core “functionality” works, the rest of the styling is just aesthetic sugar:
The version on 30 seconds of code uses a CSS Grid layout for the list items, which admittedly is more robust. I just thought it was interesting how close you can get in so little CSS without it. They also have a version where the <dt>s stretch the whole width which is also nice.
