Change the color of a bullet in a html list?

Solution 1:

The bullet gets its color from the text. So if you want to have a different color bullet than text in your list you'll have to add some markup.

Wrap the list text in a span:

<ul>
  <li><span>item #1</span></li>
  <li><span>item #2</span></li>
  <li><span>item #3</span></li>
</ul>

Then modify your style rules slightly:

li {
  color: red; /* bullet color */
}
li span {
  color: black; /* text color */
}

Solution 2:

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. It's working in our controller environment, wondering if anyone could check this. The bullet style is also limited by what's in unicode.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
  <style type="text/css">
    li {
      list-style: none;
    }

    li:before {
      /* For a round bullet */
      content:'\2022';
      /* For a square bullet */
      /*content:'\25A0';*/
      display: block;
      position: relative;
      max-width: 0px;
      max-height: 0px;
      left: -10px;
      top: -0px;
      color: green;
      font-size: 20px;
    }
  </style>
</head>

<body>
  <ul>
    <li>foo</li>
    <li>bar</li>
  </ul>
</body>
</html>

Solution 3:

This was impossible in 2008, but it's becoming possible soon (hopefully)!

According to The W3C CSS3 specification, you can have full control over any number, glyph, or other symbol generated before a list item with the ::marker pseudo-element. To apply this to the most voted answer's solution:

<ul>
  <li>item #1</li>
  <li>item #2</li>
  <li>item #3</li>
</ul>

li::marker {
  color: red; /* bullet color */
}
li {
  color: black /* text color */
}

JSFiddle Example

Note, though, that as of July 2016, this solution is only a part of the W3C Working Draft and does not work in any major browsers, yet.

If you want this feature, do these:

Blink (Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Yandex, etc.): star Chromium's issue
Gecko (Firefox, Iceweasel, etc.): Click "(vote)" on this bug
Trident (IE, Windows web views): Click "I can too" under "X User(s) can reproduce this bug"
^{Trident development has ceased}
EdgeHTML (MS Edge, Windows web views, Windows Modern apps): Click "Vote" on this prpopsal
Webkit (Safari, Steam, WebOS, etc.): CC yourself to this bug

Solution 4:

<ul>
  <li style="color: #888;"><span style="color: #000">test</span></li>
</ul>

the big problem with this method is the extra markup. (the span tag)

Solution 5:

Hello maybe this answer is late but is the correct one to achieve this.

Ok the fact is that you must specify an internal tag to make the LIst text be on the usual black (or what ever you want to get it). But is also true that you can REDEFINE any TAGS and internal tags with CSS. So the best way to do this use a SHORTER tag for the redefinition

Usign this CSS definition:

li { color: red; }
li b { color: black; font_weight: normal; }
.c1 { color: red; }
.c2 { color: blue; }
.c3 { color: green; }

And this html code:

<ul>
<li><b>Text 1</b></li>
<li><b>Text 2</b></li>
<li><b>Text 3</b></li>
</ul>

You get required result. Also you can make each disc diferent color:

<ul>
    <li class="c1"><b>Text 1</b></li>
    <li class="c2"><b>Text 2</b></li>
    <li class="c3"><b>Text 3</b></li>
 </ul>