[whatwg] [html5] Numbering things other than <li>

Anne van Kesteren fora at annevankesteren.nl
Sat Jan 8 05:42:06 PST 2005


Matthew Thomas wrote:
> Yes, people have lots of fun trying to find the correct markup for this 
> situation. <http://simplebits.com/notebook/2004/04/20/sq.html>
> 
> The general problem is that people want to number (or, less commonly, 
> bullet) series of items that are already in multi-element structures, 
> such that <ol>/<ul> cannot be used. Here, if numbering were not 
> required, you would arguably be using <dl> (since each section is a full 
> definition of the instruction given in its first line), but <dt>s can't 
> be numbered automatically solely with HTML. The same applies to a formal 
> dictionary where definitions <dd> for each term should be numbered. And 
> the same applies to a table where each row <tr> should be numbered.

So DL is the biggest problem here, I guess. Since DT can occure multiple 
times and DD as well. Perhaps we should introduce DI, like XHTML 2.0 to 
take away this problem and a lot of other problems with regard to 
styling DL elements?


-- 
  Anne van Kesteren
  <http://annevankesteren.nl/>




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