Re: DI element

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Jul 2007, Rene Saarsoo wrote:
>> The main problem (for me) with <dl>, is that it's pretty hard to style 
>> with CSS.
> 
> That's a problem with CSS, not with <dl>. (It applies to a number of HTML 
> constructs, e.g. implied sections, label/control groups, styling runs of 
> elements with the same class, etc.)
> 

I don't really think it's a problem with CSS, it's just an impedance 
mismatch: CSS was designed to work (mostly) in terms of the DOM, while 
HTML (moreso in version 5) has been designed to have various 
relationships "out of band" outside of the DOM. These are not 
addressable by CSS.

If there is no way to make this relationships appear in the DOM, 
presumably a solution to this would be to define HTML-specific 
pseudo-classes or -elements on various elements. For example:

dl::whole-definition {}
dl::definition-term {}
dl::definition-definition {}
input[type="text"]::control-label {}

(names for illustrative purposes only.)

Or is the intention to have the CSS-WG worry about these issues, despite 
the fact that they are specific to HTML?

Received on Monday, 2 July 2007 07:23:57 UTC