- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 00:40:55 +0300 (EEST)
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Thu, 26 May 2005, Laurens Holst wrote: > > (dt, dd)+ > > I think (hope) this is intentional. This is also the case in HTML 4. I think (fear) that the muddy semantics is intentional too; in HTML 4 it may still have been an accident. Call it a duck, name it duck, and then tell it can be used as a cow. So much for semantics. That is, it is called a definition list, explained as a definition list, and the tag names reflect this, and then we have the final statement, which tells that it was all a joke and we just have some tags that can be used whenever you wish to achieve some particular layout: "Another application of dl, for example, is for marking up dialogues, with each dt naming a speaker, and each dd containing his or her words." Another application of a duck is for milking... At least it should be named "description list", with subelements called "item" and "description" for example. It is absurd to say that <dt> means definition term and then tell people to use it to name a speaker. Another approach would be to remove the <dl> element entirely, admitting that there are things for which there is no adequate markup yet, such as definitions and dialogues. The common use of <dl> for lists of short items followed by annotations can be handled either by using a general list construct and (for example) a heading and a paragraph inside each list, or by using a two-column table, perhaps styled in a non-tabular presentation. What puzzles me is that the XHTML 2.0 draft preserves so many ill-designed features, including bad element names, from HTML 4, yet manages to break compatibility with it. -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Thursday, 26 May 2005 21:40:59 UTC