[whatwg] Lists and legal documents

[Brian Campbell]

On Feb 5, 2010, at 10:21 AM, Anne van Kesteren 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>
>   ...

The obsolete and non-conforming @type, along with the @value attribute on <li>, can be used for this purpose:

<ol type=a>
  <li value=1>...
</ol>

Or, if you want to keep the type information together with the value:

<ol>
  <li type=a value=1>...
</ol>

Would it make sense to make this no longer obsolete and non-conforming, as the list item type really is meaningful in many documents? Also, is the behavior of @type currently documented anywhere in HTML5? While the values that @type currently accepts are fairly limited (a, A, 1, i, I, as far as I know), they could be extended to include all of the values defined in CSS, with the old values deprecated.

I'm not particularly attached to this solution, but it is implemented in browsers already, and it is fairly widely used; for instance, see the Mozilla Public License http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1.html , the IBM public license http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ibmpl.php , and various other usages you can find with a Google code search: http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=lang:html+"ol+type"&hl=en&btnG=Search+Code . Many of those uses may be better handled with a stylesheet, but @type is used in many places in which the format of the number is meaningful for referring to clauses in legal documents.

-- Brian