Simple 2-column navigation with CSS and a single l

Question

I am looking to make a two-column navigation bar by using a single <ul> with six <li> items:

<nav>
    <ul>
    <li>Home</li>
    <li>About</li>
    <li>Team</li>    
    <li>Store</li>
    <li>Blog</li>
    <li>Contact</li>
    </ul>
</nav>​

Three elements on one side, and three on the other; ordered vertically.

Right now, it's easy to do when making two seperate <ul> elements and putting padding/margins between them: http://jsfiddle.net/Baumr/SJcjN/ — but that's not a great solution.

Could also wrap <span> tags around each set of three <li>'s — but is that the only CSS solution?

Looking for some elegant ideas. Thank you!

Answer 1

I think that using <span>'s might be the most cross-browser friendly solution.

Unless someone has other ideas? Looking for something cross-browser compatible, as sadly IE doesn't support nth-child(N).

This is not as clean (HTML wise) as I wanted, with these random spans, but here is the HTML:

<nav>
<ul>
<span>
<li>Home</li>
<li>About</li>
<li>Team</li>
</span><span>
<li>Store</li>
<li>Blog</li>
<li>Contact</li>
</span>
</ul>
</nav>

(Notice the span inside the ul — big faux pas in my book.)

And the CSS:

nav span {
    width: 50%;
    float: left;
}

But that's hardly a good solution... any other ideas?

Answer 2

<ul>
  <li>Home</li>
  <li>About</li>
  <li>Team</li>    
  <li>Store</li>
  <li>Blog</li>
  <li>Contact</li>
</ul>

CSS:

li {
  width: 50%;
  float: left;
  padding: 5px 0; 
}

They will order like that:

Home About
Team Store
Blog Contact

If that's not a problem, you have a very simple solution.

EDIT:

li:nth-child(even) {
  width: 50%;
  float: right; 
}
li:nth-child(odd) {
  width: 50%;
  float: left;
}

This will order them in the correct way. not sure how IE will act, but will work in all other browsers.

or you can follow strictly the UL-LI concept, so your html will look like this an you can have as many column as you need:

<nav>
    <ul class="menuitem">
       <li class="column">
          <ul>               
            <li>Home</li>
            <li>About</li>
            <li>Team</li>
          </ul>
        </li>
        <li class="column">
          <ul>               
             <li>Store</li>
             <li>Blog</li>
             <li>Contact</li>
          </ul>
        </li>               
    </ul>

    <ul class="menuitem">
        <li class="column">
          .....
        </li>
    </ul>      

</nav>

Making a correct and well formated html can make your life easier.