[whatwg] Sequential List Proposal

[Simon Pieters]

On Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:16:11 +0200, Michel Fortin  
<michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote:

> Following the discussion about the limitations of <dialog>, I meditated  
> about it a little and came up with the idea to generalize things a  
> little more.
>
> When we have a dialog intermixed with actions and other events (like  
> "ABC leaves the chat room"), basically we have a sequential list of  
> events, actions and spoken parts. And in my later example, the Canadian  
> Parliament hansard, they're intermixed with timestamps at regular  
> intervals and other notes regarding live translations. Again, this fits  
> very well the concept of a list of different kinds of intermixed  
> sequential events.
>
> So I propose a <sl> element (sequential list) which can be used to  
> replace <dialog> as well as other things. The proposal can be found here:
>
> <http://www.michelf.com/documents/whatwg/timeline/>

I get a 404 for this URI.

> Basically, <dt> and <dd> work just like they do in <dialog> currently,  
> except that you can have more than one <dd> following a <dt>. <li> is  
> used for listing events other than speech and <time> is used to insert  
> time marks where appropriate. And you don't need to have any spoken  
> part, meaning you can use it for system logs, or historical timelines  
> too by using only <li> and <time>.

It seems to me like a sequential list with only <li> and <time> seems very  
much like <ol>, so why not use <ol> for such cases? Authors have hard  
enough time to choose between the various abstract list elements already,  
let's not introduce more of them. :-)

-- 
Simon Pieters