RE: CTP's UL, OL, LI Proposal....

Chris Josephes writes:

 > From what I've read I'd like to make the following recommendation.  It is 
 > clear that there have been no less than seven attributes declared for UL 
 > alone (from Warren), so I would like to recommend that these attributes 
 > be logically broken down into "structure" and "presentation" depending on 
 > their function.  I would then urge that some of the "presentation" 
 > attributes be moved over to style sheets to keep things a bit less complex.

Agreed, but for different reasons.

 > The latest CSS draft has the 'list-style' property that can be set to a 
 > numeric type, a bullet type, or a URI for an image.  So, you could have 
 > the following:
 > 
 > UL { list-style: "greendot.gif" disc }
 > 
 > Which would display a green dot in graphical browsers, or a disc if the 
 > image was unavailable.
 > 
 > The list-style property only affects elements with the display element 
 > set to list-item, so there is no need to worry about green dots appearing 
 > in headers or tables.
 > 
 > The only disadvantage of this is that there is no mention in the CSS 
 > draft as how to handle dingbats.  (Maybe as a solution to this, we could 
 > just use constant values prefixed with "ding-", such as "ding-binhex" or 
 > "ding-audio")

Right. I don't care too much for the "ding-" prefix, but I'm sure we
can agree on some naming mechanism. See [1] for a list of "HTML
predefined icon-like symbols".

[1] http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-wwwicn

 > As far as presentation control goes, why not have a set of elements that 
 > only affect "list-items" selectors?  But in this case, it should affect 
 > whatever is used to as an indentifier for a list item, whether it is a roman 
 > numeral or a gif image.  I'd recommend calling such elements "index-height", 
 > "index-width", "index-hspace" and "index-vspace".
 > 
 > So, a CSS could look like this....
 > 
 > LI { list-style: "applelogo.gif" disc
 >      index-height: 2ex
 >      index-width: 1em
 >    }

We've gone down this path before (with special properties for e.g.
dropcap characters) and it was a dead end. Pseudo-elements are a
better solution:

  LI { list-style: "applelogo.gif" disc }
  LI:index { height: 2ex; width: 1em }

CSS1 is closed at this point, but the things we discuss could
potentially get into the next round.

Regards,

-h&kon

Hakon W Lie, W3C/INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France
http://www.w3.org/people/howcome  howcome@w3.org

Received on Saturday, 18 May 1996 09:04:03 UTC