How to vertically align <li> elements in <ul>?

css

I have a horizontal <ul> and I need to center each <li> in it vertically. My markup is below. Each <li> has a border, and I need the items as well as their contents to be in the middle vertically. Please help; I am new to CSS.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <title></title>
    <style type="text/css">
        .toolbar li
        {
            border: solid 1px black;
            display: block;
            float: left;
            height: 100px;
            list-style-type: none;
            margin: 10px;
            vertical-align: middle;
        }
        .toolbar li.button
        {
            height: 50px;
        }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
    <div class="toolbar">
        <ul>
            <li><a href="#">first item<br />
                first item<br />
                first item</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">second item</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">last item</a></li>
            <li class="button"><a href="#">button<br />
                button</a></li>
        </ul>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Solution 1:

Here's a good one:

Set line-height equal to whatever the height is; works like a charm!

E.g:

li {
    height: 30px;
    line-height: 30px;
}

Solution 2:

I assume that since you're using an XML declaration, you're not worrying about IE or older browsers.

So you can use display:table-cell and display:table-row like so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <title></title>
    <style type="text/css">
        .toolbar ul {
            display:table-row;
        }
        .toolbar ul li
        {
            display: table-cell;
            height: 100px;
            list-style-type: none;
            margin: 10px;
            vertical-align: middle;
        }
        .toolbar ul li a {
            display:table-cell;
            vertical-align: middle;
            height:100px;
            border: solid 1px black;
        }
        .toolbar ul li.button a {
            height:50px;
            border: solid 1px black;
        }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
    <div class="toolbar">
        <ul>
            <li><a href="#">first item<br />
                first item<br />
                first item</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">second item</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">last item</a></li>
            <li class="button"><a href="#">button<br />
                button</a></li>
        </ul>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Solution 3:

You can use flexbox for this.

ul {
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
}

A detailed explanation of how to use flexbox can be found here.

How to vertically align <li> elements in <ul>?

Solution 1:

Solution 2:

Solution 3:

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