Re: several messages about <ol>, <ul>, <dl>, and related subjects

Hello,

Le 26 févr. 08 à 05:29, Ian Hickson a écrit :

> Well, once you get rid of dialog from <dl>, there really isn't a  
> reason
> for it to be ordered... except when you're using <dl> as a "switch
> statement"-type construction, I guess, which HTML5 does a lot...  
> Hmm. I've
> updated the spec to handle this.

What did Mikko meant by “"switch statement"-type construction”? Could  
you give an example.

> [LH topic]
> <figure>
>  <legend> Caption... <legend>
>  <ol>
>   <li>...
>  </ol>
> </figure>

Thank you for this!


> On Sat, 10 Feb 2007, David Latapie wrote:
>>
>> Are you sure?
>>
>> <dl>
>> 	<dd>How do you call a technically brilliant but socially inept
>> person?</dd>
>> 	<dt>A nerd</dt>
>> </dt>
>
> Right now this would be a name-value list with two name-value  
> pairs, the
> first having a value but not name, and the second have a name but no
> value. While the markup in this example is subtly clever it's still  
> wrong.
> At least according to the spec. :-)
>
>
> On Tue, 13 Feb 2007, David Latapie wrote:
>>
>> A definition list (<dl>) provides a relationship between an important
>> element (<dt>) and a less-important one (<dd>). One might argue  
>> the 1:1
>> ratio is not necessary; One can think of two <dt> for one <dd> or,  
>> more
>> often, one <dt> and, say, three <dd>.
>>
>> In a table, the same relation exists between <th> and <td>. Also,  
>> both
>> <dl> and <table> are block elements (which, IMHO, doesn't matter  
>> when we
>> talk of semantics).
>>
>> There is not a mere redundancy here: <table> is able to represent  
>> more
>> complex relations than <dl> can
>> • <caption> has no equivalent in <dl> (LH didn't made it in HTML 3.0)
>> • <dl> may only have one relationship (<dt> to <dd>, even with  
>> multiple
>> <dt>/<dd>) whereas <table> may have two (maybe more, but I am not  
>> sure)
>
> Indeed. Similarly, <dl> can depict things that <table> cannot (e.g.  
> with
> varying numbers of <dt>s and <dd>s). Also, <ol> is equivalent to a
> one-column <table>.
>
> This can't be expressed using a table (at least not in any way that
> clearly indicates the relationship between the cells):
>
>    <dl>
>     <dt> 1
>     <dd> a
>     <dt> 20
>     <dt> 21
>     <dd> b
>     <dd> bb
>     <dd> bbb
>     <dt> 3
>     <dd> c
>    </dl>

I'll investigate on this. Thank you for having replied to it.

>
> <dfn> is still unambiguously the way to mark the terms in definitions;
> used with <dl> (which can no longer be used for dialog) it handles
> definitions fine in HTML5, as far as I can tell.

Question: in the example below

<dl>
    <dt><dfn>Term</dfn></dt>
    <dd>Definition</dd>
</dl>

I see redundancy between <dt> and <dfn> (<dfn> being an inline  
variant of <dt>).

Could someone give me an example where <dfn> is not encompassing the  
whole content of <dt>?

>> No, I think it matters a lot. For those who don't read the spec (i.e.
>> 99.999%) it obviously has no significanse at all, but there has to  
>> be an
>> unambigous semantic definition for each element type for the little
>> minority who actually want to do things right.
>
> If we assume there are half a billion Web authors, 99.9999% means that
> only 500 people will read the spec. There are more than 500 people
> subscribed to the WHATWG mailing list. :-)

There is one extra 9 in your explanation :-). Still, I would not be  
surprised if there was 5000 people subscribed to WHATWG mailing  
list. :-)

Received on Tuesday, 26 February 2008 21:44:09 UTC