[whatwg] Reverse ordered lists

[Siemova]

On Jan 23, 2008 9:32 AM, Sam Arthur Allen <dev at atshop3d.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:07:02 -0600
> Siemova <siemova at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > But then what would someone do in order to begin a list but not end
> > it? For instance, if they wanted to say:
> >
> > "10. Blah
> > 9. Blah
> > 8. Blah
> >
> > And so forth..."
>
> Then in this situation, a start value would be necessary.
>


You're right! My apologies for misreading. Earlier I thought for a moment
you were advocating having no start attribute at all. *sheepish grin*


> Personally, I don't see any problem with allowing list items to be
> > numbered 0 or negatively, so I think the "1, 0, -1, -2" default
> > approach would work fine.
>
> I can only disagree with using negative numbers in a reverse order
> list, since I communicate to many people in non-english countries
> that use brackets to display negative numbers in their locale. So a
> list would appear as:
>
>    1 : Red
>    0 : Green
>   (1): Blue
>   (2): Violet
>   (3): ...etc...
>
> and if a long list is printed out on paper, all anybody would see is:
>
>  (120): Insert a really long paragraph of text here.
>         ...
>  (121): And one here too
>         ...
>
> which, to someone outside of their locale, would appear confusing.
>


Aha. Well, your intended audience will understand anyway, right? And if any
other reader looks at the beginning of the list, or is familiar with the
context (surely the author would explain the list in some fashion), they'll
know what's going on. Is that scenario really dire enough to prevent
negative numbering, particularly given how troublesome and unintuitive it
might be to figure out how to number items that should be negative but
aren't allowed to display that way?

- Jason
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