[whatwg] Reverse ordered lists

[Simon Pieters]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:41:25 +0100, Jonas Sicking <jonas at sicking.cc> wrote:

> 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.

That's an interesting point, but I don't see it as a show-stopper. Either  
you allow it to have the wrong numbers while loading, or you make reverse  
ordered lists block layout for a while, or we could use something along  
the lines of:

    <ol count-down-from="6">

...which is more of a pain to author but at least can render correctly  
incrementally.


> This problem is even worse if the paragraph above contains something  
> like:
>
> "Make sure to turn on the power after step 2 below".

Instructions are seldom put in reverse order. ;-)

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software