HTML and CSS —

Grouping Menu Items

Still another means of bringing added clarity to your forms is grouping items within a menu. This is done using the optgroup element. Along with optgroup, you also use the label attribute in both the optgroup opening tag and each individual item within that group (see Example 5-15).

Example 5-15. Using optgroup to group options in a form menu
<select name="regions" size="14">
<optgroup label="Western Region">
<option value="Arizona" label="Arizona">Arizona</option>
<option value="California" label="California">California</option>
<option value="Colorado" label="Colorado">Colorado</option>
<option value="Nevada" label="Nevada">Nevada</option>
<option value="Texas" label="Texas">Texas</option>
<option value="Utah" label="Utah">Utah</option>
</optgroup>
<optgroup label="Eastern Region">
<option value="Connecticut" label="Connecticut">Connecticut</option>
<option value="Maine" label="Maine">Maine</option>
<option value="New_Hampshire" label="New Hampshire">New Hampshire</option>
<option value="New_Jersey" label="New Jersey">New Jersey</option>
<option value="New_York" label="New York">New York</option>
<option value="Vermont" label="Vermont">Vermont</option>
</optgroup>
</select>

Figure 5-16 shows the results.

Figure 5-16. Grouping form menus into logical sections.