Question regarding Legal Documents and Heavy use of Nested Numbered Lists

Hello everyone,

I am struggling to find what should be the best practice around Legal documents or other documents which have a lot of nested numbered lists.

Should these lists be encoded as true lists in HTML or should they be hard coded within the <p> tags.
I see pros and cons for both ways.  For accessibility reasons having these as true lists is important for navigation etc. but if you are trying to cite some legal section 2.5.3 for example and copy that out and past it into another document it usually will revert to 1.1.1.  There may be other concerns I am not thinking of especially say a multi-page document and needing to keep track on a different page where the numbering scheme left of so you can update the list’s starting point.

Any thoughts on how these heavily nested list documents should be encoded from an accessibility perspective.


Thanks
Charles
EOM

Charles LaPierre
Principal, Accessibility and Content Quality Architect
Benetech
Twitter: @CLaPierreA11Y