There are now loads of places on the Internet where one can access free CSS menu's. But of the many that are available very few suceed in replicating the prehistoric roll-over image menu using javascript image replacement techniques, with only lovely CSS. I have managed to create one that works in both decent web browsers and crap ones (Internet Explorer), view the finished CSS menu.

First I needed to remove all padding and margins from the page:

* { padding: 0em; margin: 0em; }

Then the CSS for the #nav container div:

#nav img { border: none; }
#nav li { display: inline; list-style:none; }
#nav li a { float: left; display:block; width: 37px; height: 50px; margin: 5%; }
#nav li a img { border:none; vertical-align:bottom; /* for IE6 */}
#nav li a:hover { visibility:visible; /* for IE6 */ }
#nav li a:hover img { visibility:visible; /* for IE6 */ }
#nav li a:hover img/**/ { visibility:hidden; /* hide from IE5.0/win */}

Internet Explorer requires something to happen on a:hover as well as a:hover img.

The menu list items all use different images on rollover so I defined each with a different ID on the anchor element:

#one { background:url(http://www.alanwho.com/examples/css/rollover_menu/1over.png) no-repeat left bottom; }
#two { background:url(http://www.alanwho.com/examples/css/rollover_menu/2over.png) no-repeat left bottom; }
#three { background:url(http://www.alanwho.com/examples/css/rollover_menu/3over.png) no-repeat left bottom; }
#four { background:url(http://www.alanwho.com/examples/css/rollover_menu/4over.png) no-repeat left bottom; }

Lastly I created a div with an id of nav and applied the CSS into the final XHTML:

The Final Rollover CSS Image Menu XHTML.

About the Author

Alan is a 22-year-old Web Producer living in Glasgow in the UK. Alan started playing around with websites in 1996 and Alan is still playing with the internet today.

Alan maintains http://www.alanwho.com which is home to his portfolio and tutorials about web development

In his spare time, Alan enjoys fell running, reading and partying hard around the world.