[whatwg] Reverse ordered lists

[Siemova]

On Jan 23, 2008 1:23 PM, Krzysztof Żelechowski <giecrilj at stegny.2a.pl>
wrote:

>
> Dnia 23-01-2008, Śr o godzinie 12:53 -0600, Siemova pisze:
> > True, that's simplest to implement, but why put the onus on the
> > content author to add things up and specify a start value every time?
>
> If for no other reason, in order to help global warming.
> A HTML document is written once, read lots of times.
> If the author insists that counting the items is an excessive burden
> (it is not; if you cannot count yourself,
> just remove the reverse attribute
> and look at the last item as rendered)
> he could use a generator or a fix-up processor before publishing.
>
> Chris



I agree that counting is not, as a rule, an excessive burden. (In fact, I'm
one of those people dismayed that so many cashiers can't seem to count
change in their heads.) However, considering the setting, I'd still say it's
an *unnecessary *burden when the computer can simplify the process with much
less time and effort.

Moreover, and more importantly, that would make the feature terribly
inflexible. If you decided to add or remove items -- or, heaven forbid, you
wanted to (re)populate your list on-the-fly with a script -- you'd have to
keep changing the start value by hand. That would be well-nigh impossible in
certain situations, and I think it's a bit unreasonable to expect.

Now, if *UAs* wanted to render the list incrementally in ascending order and
then reverse the numbering, that sounds better worth considering, if still
not ideal.

Asking from ignorance: would it be so terrible not to render a reversed list
at all until it has been fully calculated? Or perhaps to have the UA see the
reverse flag, count up the items to determine start value, and *then *render
the list incrementally?

- Jason
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachments/20080123/d6798f36/attachment-0001.htm>