- From: Holger Wahlen <wahlen@ph-cip.Uni-Koeln.DE>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jul 1997 02:24:39 +0200
- To: www-html@w3.org
First, thanks to Albert Lunde for digging out the old messages from the html-wg list on the topic and quoting some excerpts. Responding to my suggestion about the markup for his multiple DD example, Jordan Reiter wrote: | ><DT>bad | ><DD><UL> | ><LI CLASS="formal">Something that isn't good. | ><LI CLASS="slang">Something that is good. | ></UL> | | Except that it seems to me that if you *are* dealing with | definitions, there's no need to complicate their meaning by | adding an unordered list to the fray. I don't quite understand why this "complicates their meaning". It's more complicated to type, sure, but how does it affect the meaning of a definition when I say, "there's a list of several definitions, this is one of them"? Is the following bad - formal sense :-) - as well then? ... <P>"Bad" can mean two things:</P> <UL> <LI CLASS="formal">Something that isn't good. <LI CLASS="slang">Something that is good. </UL> <P>Watch out, foreigners.</P> ... | >Regardless of the exact implementation, I agree that there | >should be the restrictions listed by E. Stephen Mack | ><estephen@emf.net>: | > | >| making it impossible to start with a definition, or to have | >| only one definition without any terms or only one term | >| without any definitions. | | Notice, though, that my example is alright with his | restrictions. Yes, of course; I didn't mean to imply anything else. I just wanted to sum up these points as the ones that we apparently all agree about (at least I haven't seen any other opinions until now), so that we can consider them as definite requirements for a new definition, while the question of multiple terms or definitions is still under discussion. As you put it: | I think some consideration should be made to conforming the | DTD to these restrictions, rather than saying "well, these | restrictions fit into the current DTD anyway." Agreed. Unless I have overlooked something, there are four possibilites: If we want to keep the present content models, which don't allow lists within DT, there are (1) (DT+, DD)+ (multiple DTs are allowed, multiple DDs aren't, plus the restrictions given above) and (2) (DT+, DD+)+ (only those restrictions, arbitrary order otherwise); if the DT content model is changed, "DT+" can be replaced by "DT" in these two. To me, such a change doesn't seem appropriate, though, and I'm still not convinced as to why the UL solution shouldn't be the most logical one for a case with multiple definitions; so my favorite remains (1).
Received on Tuesday, 29 July 1997 20:24:53 UTC