[whatwg] Lists and legal documents

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 9:21 AM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk at opera.com> wrote:
> These indicators are part of the content and cannot be governed by style
> sheets. End users having their own custom style sheets overwriting the
> indicators with their own preference would be a problem, for instance.
>
> I have seen at least one editor used that generates markup like this:
>
>  <ul>
>   <li><span class="ol">a.</span> ...</li>
>   ...
>
> to work around this. You can see this online here:
>
>  http://regels-stadskanaal.nl/
>
> I think it would be good if we either solved this problem natively or at
> least gave some advice for people finding themselves in a similar situation.

Since they are indeed part of the content, not a question of style,
I'm not seeing anything wrong with putting the marker directly in the
content.  Preferably you'd still want to use an <ol>, though, with
list-style:none on it.  User stylesheets can't generally turn on <ol>
markers, as a lot of sites use them or <ul>s as navigation and the
like, and completely restyle them in such a way that the website would
be rendered horribly if you turned the markers back on.

Some advice might be a good idea, just recommending still using <ol>,
turning off markers, and then putting the exact marker content into
the <li>s.

~TJ