[whatwg] Reverse ordered lists

[Simon Pieters]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:54:23 +0100, Siemova <siemova at gmail.com> wrote:

>> 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.

Not a valid reason to ban negative numbers, IMHO.


> 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?

Negative numbers aren't really prevented today. It's also interesting how  
negative numbers and 0 interacts with different list type=''s in different  
browsers...

    http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/?%3Col%20type%3Da%20start%3D-2%3E%3Cli%3Ex%3Cli%3Ex%3Cli%3Ex%3Cli%3Ex%3Cli%3Ex


It was pointed out to me that the start='' attribute (and the  
corresponding DOM attribute) currently defaults to 1. This could, AFAICT,  
reaonably trivially be changed to make it depend on the direction of the  
list and the number of <li> children.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software