Re: ol, ul, nl, dl, oh my! (was Re: [XHTML 2] removal of navigation list element)

On Wed, 1 Jun 2005, Shane McCarron wrote:

> Remember that, to some extent, there is a large user base that we need
> to take care of here. We don't want to start changing the names of
> commonly used elements or attributes without some compelling reason.

XHTML 2.0 is by design incompatible with previous versions of HTML.
I think that's a wrong move, but as long as that's the policy, I see
little reason to preserve poorly designed elements.

> Also, this is really about the semantics, not the presentation.  If you
> put stuff in an "ol" list you are saying "the order of these items is
> important, and likely critical to understanding the information".

No, I'm not. It's just explicit numbering. I want to make some points, and
I number them, for example in order to refer them elsewhere in the
document, or outside it.

> If
> you put stuff in a "ul" list, you are saying "the order of this stuff is
> what I used when writing the document, but the order is not critical to
> understanding the information".  At least, that is how I think it should
> be interpreted.

Does that apply to a sequence of paragraphs, too? If the order of <li>
elements does not matter (when they appear as subelements of <ul>), why
would the mutual order of other elements matter?

It's still a _list_. Not a collection or set of items.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 1 June 2005 17:04:25 UTC