[whatwg] Reverse ordered lists

[Jonas Sicking]

Robert (Jamie) Munro wrote:
> Simon Pieters wrote:
>> See: http://forums.whatwg.org/viewtopic.php?t=130
>>
>> Siemova wrote:
>>> I recently wanted to create an OL in reverse order. In scouring the 
>>> web for a solution, I found no simple way to accomplish this, but 
>>> came across a number of other people frustrated by the lack of this 
>>> minor feature.
>>> The easiest, most obvious solution would be to create an attribute 
>>> for Ordered Lists -- let's call it order="" -- which would have two 
>>> possible values: ftl (first to last) and ltf (last to first).
> 
>> (A boolean reverse="" attribute or so would also work, I guess.)
> 
> How about a step attribute that is allowed to be negative?
> 
> That way:
> 
> <ol step="-1">
> <li>A</li>
> <li>B</li>
> </ol>
> 
> would be:
> 2. A
> 1. B

How would incremental rendering work? Imagine the following page

<ol step="-1">
<li>A</li>
<li>B</li>
<li>C</li>
<li>D</li>
<li>E</li>
<li>F</li>
</ol>

If the browser has only received the first three items it would render

3. A
2. B
1. C

a couple of seconds later it receives the rest of the page. It would 
then have to renumber all so far rendered items. This would look very 
strange to the user watching the page as it's loading. This problem is 
even worse if the paragraph above contains something like:

"Make sure to turn on the power after step 2 below".

/ Jonas