[whatwg] Section nesting menu and an old HTML 3 friend LH

Robert Brodrecht whatwg at robertdot.org
Fri Mar 30 16:29:38 PDT 2007


Tim Connor said:
> <lh> being returned would be really nice, imho. It would have been
> really nice if it was in 4.0 and then 1.x, but better late then never.
> It's always been annoyed at having the choice of bare text (a pain to
> style and script) in the li, followed by a block element, or a
> semantically useless span.  This would be especially helpful since most
> of the list elements seem to not be sectioning elements, thus have no
> way to do the equivalent:
>
> <ol>
>   <lh>A list on stuff</lh>
>   <li>I, Item</li>
>   <li>
>      <ol>
>        <lh>Item, the God</lh>
>         <li>Plot synopsis</li>
>         <li>Characters</li>
>         <li>Stunning conclusion</li>
>      </ol>
>   </li>
> </ol>

Lists can be ambiguous.  I've been front loading lists with headers and
introductory paragraphs since I started paying attention to accessibility.
 Front loading can make sense with decent writing, but there are cases
like navigation lists where saying "this is a navigation list" without
extra elements floating around outside of the list would be very very
helpful when trying to work with accessible designs.  This, to me, has the
same sort of use cases as <caption> does in <table>.  I could easily say
"the following table is about 'X'" in a paragraph before the table but the
<caption> is a much better solution because it is semantically tied to the
table (where a header or front load paragraph is not).   It'd be valuable
to have something like this in HTML 5.

-- 
Robert <http://robertdot.org>










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