`<menu>` HTML menu element

The <menu> HTML element is described in the HTML specification as a semantic alternative to <ul>, but treated by browsers (and exposed through the accessibility tree) as no different than <ul>. It represents an unordered list of items (which are represented by <li> elements).

<div class="news">
  <a href="#">NASA's Webb Delivers Deepest Infrared Image of Universe Yet</a>
  <menu>
    <li><button id="save">Save for later</button></li>
    <li><button id="share">Share this news</button></li>
  </menu>
</div>

.news {
  background-color: bisque;
  padding: 1em;
  border: solid thin black;
}

menu {
  list-style-type: none;
  display: flex;
  padding: 0;
  margin-bottom: 0;
  gap: 1em;
}

Attributes

This element also accepts the global attributes.

• compact Deprecated
  • : This Boolean attribute hints that the list should be rendered in a compact style. The interpretation of this attribute is browser-specific. Use CSS instead: to give a similar effect as the compact attribute, the CSS property line-height can be used with a value of 80%.

Usage notes

The <menu> and <ul> elements both represent an unordered list of items. The key difference is that <ul> primarily contains items for display, while <menu> represents a toolbar containing commands that the user can perform or activate.

[!NOTE] In early versions of the HTML specification, the <menu> element had an additional use case as a context menu. This functionality is considered obsolete and is not in the specification.

Examples

Toolbar

In this example, a <menu> is used to create a toolbar for an editing application.

HTML

<menu>
  <li><button onclick="copy()">Copy</button></li>
  <li><button onclick="cut()">Cut</button></li>
  <li><button onclick="paste()">Paste</button></li>
</menu>

Note that this is functionally no different from:

<ul>
  <li><button onclick="copy()">Copy</button></li>
  <li><button onclick="cut()">Cut</button></li>
  <li><button onclick="paste()">Paste</button></li>
</ul>

CSS

menu,
ul {
  display: flex;
  list-style: none;
  padding: 0;
  width: 400px;
}

li {
  flex-grow: 1;
}

button {
  width: 100%;
}

Result

Technical summary

Content categories	Flow content. If the element's children include at least one [` `](/firefox/mdn/html/reference/elements/li/) element: Palpable content.
Permitted content	Zero or more occurrences of [` `](/firefox/mdn/html/reference/elements/li/), [` SpecificationsStandards references are available on the canonical MDN page. Browser compatibility Browser compatibilityCompatibility data is available on the canonical MDN page. See also Other list-related HTML Elements: <ol>, <ul>, and <li>.