The basic difference between ordered and unordered lists is that ordered lists use a different “bullet” on the front of each entry with values that have some sort of ordering to them (such as A, B, C, D or I, II, III, IV) while unordered lists display the same bullet on the front of each entry. This indicates that the entries in the list are all equivalent and that there is nothing special about the order in which the entries appear.

There are a number of different bullets that are supplied to be used for this so that different lists that may be listed inside one another can be distinguished. These include squares, triangles, and circles in both outline and filled versions. One thing about CSS though is that it makes it extremely easy to substitute your own custom bulletssimply by creating your bullet as an appropriately sized image.

In one of my earliest stylesheet articles I wrote about how to do this using a small image of a computer as the bullet.

Using Custom Bullets for Your Unordered Lists

Tags: bullet, css, list