Change bullets color of an HTML list without using span

I managed this without adding markup, but instead using li:before. This obviously has all the limitations of :before (no old IE support), but it seems to work with IE8, Firefox and Chrome after some very limited testing. The bullet style is also limited by what's in unicode.

li {
  list-style: none;
}
li:before {
  /* For a round bullet */
  content: '\2022';
  /* For a square bullet */
  /*content:'\25A0';*/
  display: block;
  position: relative;
  max-width: 0;
  max-height: 0;
  left: -10px;
  top: 0;
  color: green;
  font-size: 20px;
}

<ul>
  <li>foo</li>
  <li>bar</li>
</ul>

If you can use an image then you can do this. And without an image you won't be able to change the color of the bullets only and not the text.

Using an image

li { list-style-image: url(images/yourimage.jpg); }

See

list-style-image

Without using an image

Then you have to edit the HTML markup and include a span inside the list and color the li and span with different colors.

We can combine list-style-image with svgs, which we can inline in css! This method offers incredible control over the "bullets", which can become anything.

To get a red circle, just use the following css:

ul {
  list-style-image: url('data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 10 10" width="10" height="10"><circle fill="red" cx="5" cy="5" r="2"/></svg>');
}

But this is just the beginning. This allows us to do any crazy thing we want with those bullets. circles or rectangles are easy, but anything you can draw with svg you can stick in there! Check out the bullseye example below:

ul {
  list-style-image: url('data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 10 10" width="10" height="10"><circle fill="red" cx="5" cy="5" r="5"/></svg>');
}
ul ul {
  list-style-image: url('data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 10 10" width="10" height="10"><rect fill="red" x="0" y="0" height="10" width="10"/></svg>');
}
ul ul ul {
  list-style-image: url('data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 10 10" width="10" height="10"><circle fill="red" cx="5" cy="5" r="3"/></svg>');
}
ul ul ul ul {
  list-style-image: url('data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 10 10" width="10" height="10"><rect fill="red" x="2" y="2" height="4" width="4"/></svg>');
}
ul.bulls-eye {
  list-style-image: url('data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 10 10" width="10" height="10"><circle fill="red" cx="5" cy="5" r="5"/><circle fill="white" cx="5" cy="5" r="4"/><circle fill="red" cx="5" cy="5" r="2"/></svg>');
}
ul.multi-color {
  list-style-image: url('data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 12 12" width="15" height="15"><circle fill="blue" cx="6" cy="6" r="6"/><circle fill="pink" cx="6" cy="6" r="4"/><circle fill="green" cx="6" cy="6" r="2"/></svg>');
}

<ul>
  <li>
    Big circles!

    <ul>
      <li>Big rectangles!</li>
      <li>b
        <ul>
          <li>Small circles!</li>
          <li>c
            <ul>
              <li>Small rectangles!</li>
              <li>b</li>
            </ul>
          </li>
        </ul>
      </li>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li>b</li>
</ul>

<ul class="bulls-eye">
  <li>Bulls</li>
  <li>eyes.</li>
</ul>

<ul class="multi-color">
  <li>Multi</li>
  <li>color</li>
</ul>

Width/height attributes

Some browsers require width and height attributes to be set on the <svg>, or they display nothing. At time of writing, recent versions of Firefox exhibit this problem. I've set both attributes in the examples.

Encodings

A recent comment reminded me of encodings for the data-uri. This was a pain-point for me recently, and I can share a bit of information I've researched.

The data-uri spec, which references the URI spec, says that the svg should be encoded according to the URI spec. That means all sorts of characters should be encoded, eg < becomes %3C.

Some sources suggest base64 encoding, which should fix encoding issues, however it will unnecessarily increase the size of the SVG, whereas URI encoding will not. I recommend URI encoding.