[whatwg] Lists and legal documents

Markus Ernst derernst at gmx.ch
Sat Feb 6 02:31:02 PST 2010


Anne van Kesteren schrieb:
> Legal documents often use various indicators for list items. E.g.
> 
>   a. ...
>   b. ...
>   c. ...
> 
> or
> 
>   1. ...
>   2. ...
>   3. ...
> 
> or
> 
>     I. ...
>    II. ...
>   III. ...
> 
> or
> 
>   A. ...
>   B. ...
>   C. ...
> 
> etc.
> 
> These indicators are part of the content and cannot be governed by style 
> sheets. 

This looks like part of a more general problem to me. There are more 
situations where you want custom content in the place of list indicators:

For example, in a CV you might want the years there:

1977      ...
1978-1982 ...

Or, very common in forms, a check box or radio button:

o ...
o ...

Third (this a pure style problem though), sometimes you want just some 
custom character there, such as an n-dash:

– ...
– ...

While the third one can be achieved with al list-style-image, with the 
downside that it will not be affected by changes of the text size, the 
other examples need complex CSS trickery including floats, or layout tables.


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