Re: Using <p> elements purely as containers of phrasing elements? Semantic or not?

2013-05-06 18:26, Ian Yang wrote:
> Yet I still don't understand the suggestion of using <p> as the 
> container of a set of legal-related hyperlinks in footer (Privacy 
> Policy, Terms of Use, Faq, ... etc) when a more appropriate element 
> can be used, such as <ul>.

The example being discussed here is

<p><a href="about.html">About</a> - <a href="policy.html">Privacy 
Policy</a> - <a href="contact.html">Contact Us</a></p>

It uses HYPHEN-MINUS “-” as a separator between links. It might argued 
that EN DASH “–” would be more appropriate, but in any case, it 
separates links by punctuation marks. I think this is normal, comparable 
to listing things in a sentence in a natural language: A, B, C, with the 
comma as separator.

There seems to be a school of thought that wants to use list markup for 
anything that might be construed as a list. Taken to the extremes, that 
would be obviously absurd; you can say that any word is an ordered list 
of letters, so should we write <ol><li>w<li>o<li>r<li>d</ol>? Usually 
there is *some* limit to the requirement, and often the extreme case is 
just a sequence of links. And quite often, authors then want to style 
the list in a simple manner like “About – Privacy Policy – Contact Us”, 
but they need to do extra work to turn the default formatting of <ul> 
(or <ol>) to something that can be achieved very naturally even without 
using any CSS.

On the practical side, <ul> is good for a bulleted list, <ol> is good 
for a numbered list, and if you don’t want either of them, use some 
other markup. It does not matter much which, as long as each item is 
marked up as an element and there is a container for the items as a set. 
Then you can style it as desired.

HTML5 does not take things quite that practically, but neither does it 
require that anything that looks like a list *must* be marked up as a list.

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

Received on Monday, 6 May 2013 16:02:05 UTC