CSS Cookbook

4.5. Creating Inline Lists

Problem

You want to list items to be displayed within a paragraph, as in Figure 4-6 in which the bold, comma-separated list was generated from an HTML ul list.

Figure 4-6. The list formatted to appear inside a paragraph

Solution

Set the paragraphs before (and, if needed, after) the list:

<h3>
 Table of Contents
</h3>
<p>
 As proposed, the contents of the paper will contain the 
following sections:
</p>
<ul>
 <li>I'm not the Same Person I was in the Database</li>
 <li>Past Breaches of Our Privacy</li>
 <li>The Best of Intentions</li>
 <li>Whatever Happened to Automation?</li>
 <li class="last">The Smart Choice is Not Needing to Make One</li>
</ul>
<p>
 If there are any objections to how these sections are divided, 
please let <a href="[e-mail]">Nicholas</a> know about 
it.
</p>

Through CSS, set the paragraph to display as inline elements and then use auto-generated content to show the commas between items and the period at the end of the list:

ul, li {
 display: inline;
 margin: 0;
 padding: 0;
 font-weight: bold; 
 font-style: italic;
}
li:after {
 content: ", "; 
}
li.last:after {
 content: ".";
}
p {
 display: inline;
}

Discussion

Through this method you retain the structure of lists and paragraphs, but you stretch CSS’s capability to present the list inside a paragraph. However, you hide the obvious visual appearance of a list in favor of having the contents placed inside a paragraph.

See Also

The CSS 2.1 specification about the display property at http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visuren.html#propdef-display.