Comments on: Proposals for changes to lists in HTML 5

By: Bruce

Bruce — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:46:51 +0000

I've submitted the proposal to the public-html mailing list. Reception is lukewarm.

By: Chris Mills

Chris Mills — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:21:47 +0000

I agree with you here too mate – I certainly can see why we should be allowed to do this. It makes sense in terms of oranization *and* semantics.

By: AlastairC

AlastairC — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 18:46:02 +0000

I’d add that there are problems with the valid current methods:

Nested lists, or even just headings in lists are very difficult for editors to deal with, both at the technical level (how a WYSIWYG interface works), and how end-users think about it.

Putting a heading inside a list doesn’t make sense to end users, and putting block elements in a list item seems difficult for things like TinyMCE to deal with.

By: Matt Wilcox

Matt Wilcox — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:14:09 +0000

Hi Bruce,

These all seem like great ideas to me. At the moment the only way to simulate the effect of headers “inside” lists is to use CSS counters to effect the next list, but support for those is flaky at best, and the semantics are actually quite different.

I’d like to be able to do all of the things expressed in your article.

By: Robert Whittaker

Robert Whittaker — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:55:28 +0000

I think I’d be in favour of the changes you’re suggesting, since I can see they’d be useful for many real-life examples.

There are two interesting questions that this raises though:

1/ What the difference between an ordered list and a set of numbered paragraphs?

2/ When should the numbers themselves be considered part of the content of a document, rather than part of the styling? (And how should HTML / CSS address this?)

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:07:15 +0000

I agree wholeheartedly about the headings. I’ve used nested lists with a heading in the parent to get around this, but it’s clumsy.