[whatwg] Suggest making <dt> and <dd> valid in <ol>

Ian Yang ian.html at gmail.com
Sun Jul 15 07:40:46 PDT 2012


2012/7/15 Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela at cs.tut.fi>

> 2012-07-14 18:51, Ian Yang wrote:
>
>  If <ol> is no more and no less ordered than <ul>,
>> what's the purpose of its introduction?
>>
>
> The real purposes, in the dawn of HTML, were that <ol> and <ul> correspond
> to numbered and bulleted lists, respectively, reflecting two very common
> concepts in word processors. This is how they have been used, though some
> authors have started overusing <ul> for thinks like lists of links even
> when they specifically don't want them to appear as bulleted. Even W3C
> specifications, in their markup, switch to <ul> in the midst of hierarchy
> when they want bullets and not numbers.
>
> HTML5 tries to stick to the theoretical idea of "ordered" vs. "unordered"
> list, but it does not really change anything, and it is not supposed to
> change anything - any <ul> will still be rendered in the order written.
>
> More on this:
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~**jkorpela/html/ul-ol.html<http://www.cs.tut.fi/%7Ejkorpela/html/ul-ol.html>
>


Thanks. I'm not sure if I understand it correctly. I just couldn't find a
robust information from the article to proof that <ol> is no more and no
less ordered than <ul>.

Throughout the article, I saw it mentioned "bullets" and "numbers"
frequently. However, that's just browsers' default rendering of <ul> and
<ol>. As a coder, personally I don't care how browsers render them by
default. What I care is the meaning of the code I write. That is, when I
want an unordered list, I write <ul>; when I want an ordered list, I write
<ol>. <ul> means unordered list, and <ol> means ordered list. It's that
simple.

Although there may be some people misuse them (like the example mentioned
in the article), that's not <ul> and <ol>'s problem.

If I missed anything, please let me know. Thanks again.


Sincerely,
Ian Yang



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