[whatwg] [WA1] <ol type=a> is semantic

[James Graham]

Simon Pieters wrote:

>> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, James Graham wrote:
>> >
>> > <p>The correct answer is <ref target="#correct" />) All of the 
>> above</p>
>> >
>> > Getting a decent backwards compatibility story seems, uh, 
>> non-trivial at
>> > the least. Of course this is true of CSS3 generated content as well 
>> but
>> > that doesn't seem to bother people so much...
>>
>> I like your idea. I don't know that there realy is a back-compat 
>> problem,
>> we could just say that it accepts text content, so you could write:
>>
>>    <p>The correct answer is <ref target="#correct">f</ref> All of the
>>    above</p>
>>
>> ...until such time as enough browsers support <ref> that you don't worry
>> anymore; since the answer number is (at least in this case) just
>> additional information (the answer is given right there too) it isn't a
>> huge problem if it is lost.
>
>
> I don't think this is a good solution, simply because authors would 
> never use it. For instance, take any weblog with a quiz[1][2]; is it 
> really expected that the visitors should mark up their comments with 
> <ref>s?

Maybe not, but there's a large class of problems for which this would 
provide a neat solution e.g. a  scientific document ("fig. 15 shows the 
results  of the numerical calculations described in section 3"). For the 
case you mention, putting the list item label in the content i.e.  
<li>a) foo</li> is the only method that is sure to work. Indeed,if I 
were pedantic, I could note that there is no intrinsic need for your 
list items to be  in a particular order and so <ul> is the appropriate 
container element...

-- 
 "As soon as people come up with a measurable substitute for whatever it is they care about they start treating it as more important than the real thing"
-Boris Zbarsky