Re: several messages about <ol>, <ul>, <dl>, and related subjects

On Tue, 26 Feb 2008, David Latapie wrote:
> 
> Le 26 févr. 08 à 05:29, Ian Hickson a écrit :
> 
> > Well, once you get rid of dialog from <dl>, there really isn't a reason
> > for it to be ordered... except when you're using <dl> as a "switch
> > statement"-type construction, I guess, which HTML5 does a lot... Hmm. I've
> > updated the spec to handle this.
> 
> What did Mikko meant by “"switch statement"-type construction”? Could you give
> an example.

Search for <dl class="switch"> in the spec source for many examples.


> > <dfn> is still unambiguously the way to mark the terms in definitions; 
> > used with <dl> (which can no longer be used for dialog) it handles 
> > definitions fine in HTML5, as far as I can tell.
> 
> Question: in the example below
> 
> <dl>
>    <dt><dfn>Term</dfn></dt>
>    <dd>Definition</dd>
> </dl>
> 
> I see redundancy between <dt> and <dfn> (<dfn> being an inline variant 
> of <dt>).

The way HTML5 defines them, there's not really any redundancy -- one is 
marking the Term as a defining instance, and the other is relating the 
ter (name)m to the definition (value) in the name/value pair.


> Could someone give me an example where <dfn> is not encompassing the 
> whole content of <dt>?

<dl>
   <dt>The <dfn>term</dfn>, as used in <cite>the book</cite></dt>
   <dt>The <dfn>other term</dfn>, as used in <cite>the movie</cite></dt>
   <dd>...</dd>
</dl>

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'