How do I *really* justify a horizontal menu in HTML+CSS?

Question

You find plenty of tutorials on menu bars in HTML, but for this specific (though IMHO generic) case, I haven't found any decent solution:

#  THE MENU ITEMS    SHOULD BE    JUSTIFIED     JUST AS    PLAIN TEXT     WOULD BE  #
#  ^                                                                             ^  #

• There's an varying number of text-only menu items and the page layout is fluid.
• The first menu item should be left-aligned, the last menu item should be right-aligned.
• The remaining items should be spread optimally on the menu bar.
• The number is varying,so there's no chance to pre-calculate the optimal widths.

Note that a TABLE won't work here as well:

• If you center all TDs, the first and the last item aren’t aligned correctly.
• If you left-align and right-align the first resp. the last items, the spacing will be sub-optimal.

Isn’t it strange that there is no obvious way to implement this in a clean way by using HTML and CSS?

Answer 1

The simplest thing to do is to is to force the line to break by inserting an element at the end of the line that will occupy more than the left available space and then hiding it. I've accomplished this quite easily with a simple span element like so:

#menu {
  text-align: justify;
}

#menu * {
  display: inline;
}

#menu li {
  display: inline-block;
}

#menu span {
  display: inline-block;
  position: relative;
  width: 100%;
  height: 0;
}

<div id="menu">
  <ul>
    <li><a href="#">Menu item 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Menu item 3</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Menu item 2</a></li>
  </ul>
  <span></span>
</div>