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How to style lists using CSS

Published May 25 2019

Lists are a very important part of many web pages.

CSS can style them using several properties.

list-style-type is used to set a predefined marker to be used by the list:

li {
  list-style-type: square;
}

We have lots of possible values, which you can see here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/list-style-type with examples of their appearance. Some of the most popular ones are disc, circle, square and none.

list-style-image is used to use a custom image as a marker, when a predefined marker is not appropriate:

li {
  list-style-image: url(list-image.png);
}

list-style-position lets you add the marker outside (the default) or inside of the list content, in the flow of the page rather than outside of it

li {
  list-style-position: inside;
}

The list-style shorthand property lets us specify all those properties in the same line:

li {
  list-style: url(list-image.png) inside;
}