[whatwg] Interpretation issue: can <section> be used for "extended paragraphs"?

[Bjartur Thorlacius]

On 6/14/11, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 2:04 AM, Markus Ernst <derernst at gmx.ch> wrote:
>> Consider:
>>       I like apples, pears, grapes, but not bananas. Nor do I like
>> peaches.
>> and:
>>       I like
>>          * apples
>>          * pears
>>          * grapes
>>      but not bananas. Nor do I like peaches.
>>
>> The difference between those two is presentational, not semantic. Each
>> is a single paragraph.
>
> Well, in standard English, the prose list would actually read "I like
> apples, pears, and grapes, but not bananas.".  You'd have to somehow
> mark up and hide the "and" when presenting it as a structured list
> instead of a prose list.  This suggests that there *is* a semantic
> difference between the two.  It's a subtle difference, to be sure, but
> it's there.
>
The difference isn't semantical. I'm not educated about archaic
English, but in my language, all items were seperated by an "ok", as
in "eppli ok perur ok greip" but nowadays the norm is to "somehow
hide" all the "ok"s but the last one (probably for brevity). HTML has
more structure, and can nest lists without ambiguity, so the "and" is
unnecessary.
However, if rendering lists inline, and thereby loosing this
structural nature of lists is desired, it's the job of CSS.

<ul>
<li>apples
<li>pears
<li>grapes
</ul>
but not bananas.

With the following stylesheet:
ul { display: inline; }
ul > li :after { content: ', '; }
ul > li:last-child :before { content: 'and'; }
ul > li:last-child :after {content: '';}