Thanks all for the replies.
A thought that also occurred to me whilst working on it was if you lay out a bunch of links in this style...
<dl>
<dt> <a href="http://www.google.com" title="Google, a big and useful search engine">Google</a></dt>
<dd>A big and useful search engine</dd>
</dl>
...,as you might on a "resources" page, is the link title made redundant by the <dd>? It looks like the <dd> essentially does the job of the title attribute but I'm wondering how the various screen/text readers/etc might interpret this.
Nick
The W3 says that <dl>s "generally consist of a series of term/definition pairs (although definition lists may have other applications)." As an example, "another application of <dl>... is for marking up dialogues, with each <dt> naming a speaker, and each <dd> containing his or her words." (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/lists.html)
Based on this, I personally think that <dl>s can be used for nearly any situation where you need to show a sort of parent/child relationship within a list of items, while still being semantically sound. It's also a lot quicker than doing something like:
<ul>
<li>
<h2><a href="cow_jumps_over_moon.html" ... >Cow jumps over moon</a></h2>
<p>An unnamed cow has been seen jumping over the moon say residents...</p>
</li>
<li>
<h2><a href="dish_spoon.html" ... >Dish runs away with spoon</a></h2>
<p>The mystery continues as crockery takes to the streets...</p>
</li>
</ul>
And also quite a bit more elegant, IMO.
Cheers, Cam
Nick Lo wrote:
Pondering over this one:
I'm presuming a list of links with their short intros like e.g. news articles:
<dl>
<dt><a href="cow_jumps_over_moon.html" ... >Cow jumps over moon</a></dt>
<dd>An unnamed cow has been seen jumping over the moon say residents...</dd>
<dt><a href="dish_spoon.html" ... >Dish runs away with spoon</a></dt>
<dd>The mystery continues as crockery takes to the streets...</dd>
</dl>
Works as a definition list in a semantically comforting way? Am I wrong?
****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************