Re: [WSG] DLs and multiple DDs, as more semantic means to produce general lists containing titles and summaries

[russ - maxdesign]

> 
> Latest News
> 
> News Item One
> 20/10/05
>  Introduction goes here...
> News Item Two
> 20/10/05
>  Introduction goes here...
> 
> 
> 

If you were going to use  to mark this information up (and that would
come down to personal preference) I'd agree with this second option. It
would be better to split the relevant information out into separate 's
rather than one. It would have more meaning for browsers that don't support
CSS and for other devices like text-based browsers where the differentiation
by span alone would mean nothing.

Here is an example where each sub-item is given its own :
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/definition/dl-event.htm

If there were only two types of  in each case (date and intro), you
could probably get away with just one class and use the general  for the
other.

HTH
Russ

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[WSG] DLs and multiple DDs, as more semantic means to produce general lists containing titles and summaries

[Sigurd Magnusson]

Untitled DocumentIn an effort to make our company's code XHTML 1.1 compliant
and more semantic (we were loosely following XHTML 1.0 Trans but now want to
more ridigly follow it), I was brainstorming for conventions and best
practices. I came up with an idea pertaining to general lists that I'd like
your input on.
Looking back at our sites, we would generally produce lists (such as news
articles with dates, summaries, leading into full pages), or products,
upcoming events, articles (.e.g
http://www.wigley.co.nz/mainsite/LatestArticles.html)  etc, in two general
ways;
1. Divs with nested headers/paragraphs. E.g.

Latest News
20/10/05 Introduction goes here...
20/10/05 Introduction goes here...

Or, a wee bit nicer, use an unordered list, almost identically:

Latest News

News Item One
20/10/05 Introduction goes here...
News Item Two
20/10/05 Introduction goes here...


However, it occured to when reading the XHTML 1.1 doctype's list module,
that it would be appropriate to use the definition list (dl, dt, dd) for
lists where you had a clear heiracy of titles and associated information
about them. The first example shows the proper heirachy between h1,h2 (news
article) and introduction, but doesn't give any semantic idea that the h2's
are all related in a list.
So, you could do this:

Latest News

News Item One
20/10/05 Introduction goes here...
News Item Two
20/10/05 Introduction goes here...


This gives both the idea of "list of items" and that the list has 'titles'
and 'descriptions'... I also went back to the W3C and determined that it is
a requirement of the html401 spec to allow multiple DDs for a DT. (e.g. if
your DT was for a word that had several meanings. Even Netscape 4 supports
it!), so you could even do the following, which I feel most comfortable
about:

Latest News

News Item One
20/10/05
 Introduction goes here...
News Item Two
20/10/05
 Introduction goes here...


While I do understand the DL is for a definition list, the W3C provide
another acceptable use of it as a transcript of people talking. To me, this
seems like another appropriate use that was simply not dreamed of years ago
when the spec was built--I can't see any places where this is used, not that
I looked around much ...
Ideas? Opinions?
Siggy 

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