Re: Against 'start' and 'value' attributes

* Tantek Çelik wrote:
>There are absolutely uses for start and value attributes.  I can see marking
>up the markers with tags rather than attributes, but certainly in the
>immediate future it makes sense to undeprecate start and value while a
>better solution is worked out.

If the HTML WG is willing to work out a better solution, could we please
hear it's consensus on what problem is to be solved, first? Without
start and value attributes, ordered lists are continuous, have logically
a first, a second, a third, etc. item and it doesn't matter how a user
agent renders this information.

Now some people provided use cases for ordered lists where the rendering
of item numbers is "content" and thus important. Shall XHTML 2.0 provide
support for this type of ordered lists? If this is a valid use case, the
start and value attributes provide no solution. Others like to have
reversely ordered lists, if this is to be considered, the value
attribute is a solution, but a rather bad one. People provided use cases
for ordered lists broken into several parts, others like to use
non-continuous lists, etc.

There are many requests and I agree with some of them and I disagree
with others, thus I think a more fruiteful discussion should start with
requirements and use cases rather than a solution and claiming there are
uses for it. I just cannot decide whether the start and value attributes
are a good solution or whatever else would be a better solution, if I
don't know the problem or don't think the problem needs to be solved at
all.

So, asking again, would the HTML WG please collect requirements and use
cases for ordered lists in XHTML 2.0, discuss them and provide it's
consensus to the community? This would certainly help a lot.

regards.

Received on Monday, 17 March 2003 21:54:09 UTC