[html5] the limit of lists?

[Cory Sand]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2014 at 12:57 PM, cat <catsoul at thinkplan.org> wrote:

> On Aug 28, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Cory Sand <yrocsand at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> but if one would not write a thing down on paper in list form, is that
>> the boundary of what an <li> ought to be used for?
>>
>
> Can you give an example of what you're thinking of here?
>
>
> certainly. I personally would not write a form onto paper as though it
> were a list. I am grateful that putting a form into a list greatly assists
> me in the presentation aspects of that form, which is no trifling matter.
>

> Yet, there are aspects OF a form which I can see as bending to what a list
> is, almost in the same sense that, in programming, pretty much everything
> could be viewed as an array..your first name is an array of the letters c,
> o, r and y.
>

Not being a webdev expert myself (and so take my opinion accordingly),
based on observation it does indeed appear to me that to the extent that
list elements are used to mark up forms in contemporary HTML, it is merely
for stylistic and/or programmatic reasons, and not because forms are
somehow "inherently" a kind of list. As you and others have pointed out,
just about anything (including a word or a sentence) could be viewed as a
list (list of letters, list of words, etc.), but I don't think that's in
the spirit of the (admittedly somewhat vague) definitions of lists in the
specs.


>
> Bare Knuckle reality: the current state of css and html leaves us with
> greatly improved, still yet lacking, tools for presentation. Lots of
> accepted/respected techniques are often described as hacks, tho they do
> work reliably.
>

Whether it's possible to style a form in an equivalent manner without
resorting to list elements would require commentary from someone with much
greater expertise than me.


> Enough spouting from me..thank you for your answers.
>

My pleasure.


>
> cat
>
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