Re: List elements (was: Tree Presented Lists )

[DJW:]
It's not [X]HTML that orders them, but tbe browser.

[DH:]
The way I see it, it's the author that orders the list item, not [x]html,
nor the browser. That kind of idea is why I'm so curious about this idea.


Tentek Celik wrote:
Semantically they are different as others have pointed out, but I wonder,
instead of <ol>, <ul>, <dl> tags, why wasn't there simply one <list> tag
with a type attribute, e.g.

 <ol> = <list type='ordered'>
 <ul> = <list type='unordered'>
 <dl> = <list type='definition'>
 <dir> = <list type='directory'>
 <menu> = <list type='menu'>"



I say:
We clearly prefer hiarchy in our struture today. If multiple problems have
one thing in common (i.e. they are all lists) we'd prefer to have a list
element, allowing us to state what kind of list we have as an attribute. The
hiarchy (yes, I can't spell it) is, from a logical standpoint: It is a list:
it is also an ordered list. But back when the list elements were created,
there seemed to be very few usages of attributes, especially compared to
today. They just created a lot of elements for everything. That's my theory,
at least.


What I would like to know, is this:
What if a future version of XHTML, let's say, for example, XHTML 2.0, has a
brand-new LIST element, that functions in a way similar to what Tantek said
above? Now, if XHTML 2.0 actually gets parsed as XML, would that mean that a
compliant XML-parsing UA automatically understand this new LIST element,
just by parsing the dtd or schema or namespace?

Daniel

Received on Friday, 20 July 2001 15:52:51 UTC