- From: Andrew Ramsden <andrew@irama.org>
- Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:40:41 +1000
- To: Andrew Sidwell <takkaria@gmail.com>
- CC: aurélien levy <aurelien.levy@free.fr>, public-html@w3.org
Fair enough, as it was pointed out, this particular case is fairly well understood under HTML 4 and will be clearly defined under 5, but as Robert Burns so artfully phrased the issue: "providing rich hierarchical structured mechanisms within the languages will also facilitate use-cases we can't think up" DI may not actually change the semantics of groups of <dt>s and <dd>s but it will make it harder for content authors to mis-interpret, and provide a more robust/flexible language for the future (as <dl>s without <di> groups could then be deprecated). This is not a radical idea, its stolen straight from the pages of XHTML2 (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-list.html#edef_list_di), and as pointed out by Thomas Broyer, has been discussed previously (http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2005-March/003160.html) On the whole the idea seemed fairly well received on the list, I'm not sure why it didn't make it in at that point. Bottom line is: It takes the /implied/ semantics of definition lists and makes those relationships /explicit/, at no harm to content authors, user-agents or you! I think its worth a rethink. Thanks for discussing the idea. Cheers, Andrew Ramsden Andrew Sidwell wrote: > Andrew Ramsden wrote: >> This may be off-topic for "html 5 and accessibility", but I agree with >> your assertion that a di element would clarify the semantic relationship >> between dt and dd elements. >> >> The specific use-case of dl that I see as ambiguous without a di element >> is: >> <dl> >> <dt></dt> >> <dt></dt> >> <dd></dd> >> </dl> >> >> Does this represent a two terms (one without a definition), or a single >> term with two possible term variations? > > In what way is it a definition term if it's not used as part of a > definition? The only common-sense answer is that both terms share the > same definition. > > Andrew Sidwell > >
Received on Monday, 2 July 2007 08:40:42 UTC