RE: DI element

> -----Message d'origine-----
> De la part de Charles 
> McCathieNevile
> Envoyé : dimanche 8 juillet 2007 05:44

> On Mon, 02 Jul 2007 06:21:31 -0400, Andrew Sidwell 
> wrote:
> 
> > AFAICS, no-one's actually given any use cases for having 
> <dt> without 
> > <dd> on this thread so far, and I can't think of any 
> offhand.  Care to 
> > elaborate?
> 
> Where you are developing a list of terms and haven't defined 
> one. As someone pointed out, you *can* tell people they must 
> have a di element even if it is empty. Which doesn't mean you should.
> 
> Having a di element lets you decide this and use things like 
> simple css or the selectors API (in development) to get what 
> you want without having to do sibling counting and the like. 
> On the other hand, it appears that there are difficulties 
> dealing with DOM and styling for this.

Here is an example off the top of my head. Let's write a glossary of
animals:

<h1>A list of animals, loosely-defined</h1>
<dl>

<dt>Dog</dt>
<dt>Cat</dt>
<dt>Horse</dt>
<dd>A mammal with four legs</dd>

<dt>Spider</dt>
<dd>Creepy-crawly with eight legs</dd>

</dl>

Technically there is no link between "Dog" and its definition. We're used to
understanding that the three <dt> refer to the same <dd>, mainly because we
can read the language and the author hopes so, but no link is actually
provided, and it's not different, HTML-wise, from this:

<dt>Dog</dt>
(implied <dd> for a definition not written yet)

<dt>Cat</dt>
(implied <dd> for a definition not written yet)

<dt>Horse</dt>
<dd lang="la">Equus caballus</dd>

Hoping to have cleared things up.

The <di> would make it all explicit indeed by either grouping the three <dt>
or explicitly setting them apart.

-- 
Best regards,
Stéphane Deschamps
  Web HCI expert
  orange / france telecom group


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Received on Monday, 9 July 2007 09:12:55 UTC