https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59849

--- Comment #4 from WhatamIdoing <[email protected]> ---
I don't understand why editors aren't allowed free use of indenting, either. 
But "free use of indenting" is bug 4521 from eight years ago.  "Free use of
indenting" is not "using the second half of the markup from a definition list
to sort of fake indenting, so that it looks okay on my desktop system but also
so that reading the page is irritating to people using screen readers".

The colon is part of semantic markup.  Screen readers don't skip over semantic
markup.  They don't just read the contents of a list.  They stop reading
content and announce that there is a list, and how long the list is.  If you
use a colon, then some screen readers (correctly) interpret this as being
marked as a long list of definitions, so that your markup:

:where,
: ''D'' = 1/''C'' is elastance
: ''C'' is capacitance
: ''S'' is stiffness

is read as something like "Term with four definitions:  where, d = 1/C is
elastance, c is capacitance, s is stiffness".  Unless you really want the words
"Term with four definitions" to be stuck in the middle of that sentence, then
you should not define those four lines as being in a definition list (aka
association list).

If you just want visual-only indentation, then you have to set span or div tags
to provide visual-only changes to the text arrangement.  As I said above, I
don't know why MediaWiki doesn't have a much simpler method for letting editors
provide visual intendations properly, and instead gives them a choice between
screwing up accessibility or having to hand-type complicated HTML codes.  Using
indentation freely been requested for at least eight years.  We have a
legitimate need for this, but I don't know if we'll ever get it.


TLDR:  The colon does *not* actually mean "indent".

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