Re: Armenian numbering: findings, recommendations and request to CSS

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 12:34 PM, Leif Halvard Silli <lhs@malform.no> wrote:
> To your question: The "upper-alpha" format can be used to keep an
> alphabetized list of English names. Likewise, "upper-norwegian" can be use
> used to keep a list of Norwegian names.
>
> The list item for the letter "Z" might contain an alphabetized list of names
> on Z.

I don't think that CSS should be used for that.  CSS is for styling --
list-style-type probably shouldn't be used if the type is essential to
the semantics.  It will fall back very poorly in non-CSS UAs or those
that don't support the particular list-style-type.  CSS list styling
is for when you want it to display a different way so it looks nice,
not for when you want to say "this is the glyph that logically begins
all entries in this section".  In the latter case, you should just
write the glyph out explicitly (typically in a header, not at the
beginning of a list item).

Also, pragmatically, it would be very cumbersome to add enumeration of
all an alphabet's letters for every language people can think up.
You'd have to have a different list-style-type for most languages --
even Latin-based alphabets differ on what they think the exact set of
letters is, and what their order is.  It seems like this would greatly
bloat the spec.

However, if you could give an explicit use-case for this, maybe I
would understand better.  I don't think I've ever seen list-style-type
used for this purpose in English, even though CSS (and HTML before it)
has fully supported it in English for a very long time.

Received on Friday, 13 February 2009 17:48:29 UTC