Henri Sivonen wrote:
HTML+ used <dl> for dialog. As far as default presentation goes, <dl>
is the best fit for marking up dialog. Yet, the semantic markup party
line is against it.
I think there are two reasons for insisting that <dl> shouldn't be
used for dialogs, i.e. that <dl> really is a definition list rather
than a generic presentational grouping device:
1) Saving face after years of such insistence.
2) Avoiding breaking software that collects term definitions from
<dl>s.
I am not a fan of #1-style reasoning. My guess is that case #2 is
already broken on the real Web.
I agree. Perhaps dl should be redefined as "Description List" or
"Descriptive List". Then dt could be relabeled as Description Title
and dd could be relabeled as Description Definition or Description
Description :D Then it could be easily used for dialog too.
I don't think that it's worth the trouble to declare dl element to
be unordered
(http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-dl). As I
see it, it's only to rationalize the #1-style above.
Is there a single user agent anywhere that doesn't present a dl list
always in the source order? If not, how about fixing this issue and
thus allowing dl to be used for dialogue?
Jukka Korpela has written a somewhat complete article about marking
up definitions as http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/def.html and
possible markup is presented at
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/def.html#markup
The dl element as we know it today is nowhere powerful enough to
express much more than a simple entry with two parts. I think it
would be wise to document the real world usage of dl element and
*if* we want a specific markup for definitions, we can define
something better.
--
Mikko
