Re: Reversing list order

> 
> I agree.  Consider html mail clients, reversing the order of messages
> would be a one-liner client-side script, instead of a round-trip to
> the server.  Could this be added to the list module easily?

I assume that the idea is to use scripting here, as very few users will
be happy with alternative style sheets.  In that case, the example is
better handled by having the script re-arrange the nodes in the document
object model.  As a precedent here, Elm does not list its article 
reference numbers in reverse order when you reverse the sort order; it
renumbers them forwards, in the new order.

I would suggest that any browser that is new enough to implement such
a new property, and implements scripting of styles, will implement 
enough of the W3C document object model to allow it to do such a shuffle,
especially as it already has to cope with the resultant re-rendering
to support the property.

> element would be more consistent than applying it to a <ul> element..

Definitely; using ul here is giving it semantics that it doesn't have.
Any de facto semantics, under CSS, are negated by the fact that the
proposal assumes a radical revision of the idea that CSS boxes are placed
in order of arrival, except when explicitly positioned.

I think the fact that this breaks incremental rendering has already been
mentioned.  I tend to agree that once you have broken that, you might as
well have reverse rendering of the nodes of an element applied generally,
not just to lists.

To Joshua: you need to subscribe to www-style@w3.org, as this is a CSS
issue, not an HTML one and was off topic on the www-html list.

Received on Monday, 17 March 2003 17:17:15 UTC