Terrence Wood wrote:
I do feel slightly unsettled using <dl> as a catch-all for anything vaguely resembling a key value pair, but can't really articulate that in an intelligent manner.... it just feels wrong somehow.
My thoughts exactly. Here's the way I'm starting to think about it though:
I think there's a structural difference between a series of headings+paragraphs and a definition list of headings+paragraphs.
Both methods can look the same, and as both contain headings and paragraphs they can be the same for disabled users, so this is a only question of the intended use of the tags.
Intended use of <dl><dt><dd><h1><p> is decided in 1) the spec and 2) W3C public reaction over the years [in that we could assume that as the W3C haven't spoken up about headings in definitions lists as being proper... and not corrected their own software such as Amaya or Tidy to generate code this way, that we've had it right all along].
The spec < http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/lists.html > says defintion lists are "generally" for term/definition pairs, and the example code marks up what are clearly headings using <strong> tags. Ugh. The spec has an example of multiple <dt>s directly following each other (because the thing they're defining has multiple terms) and then multiple definitions.
It's also said in the spec that "another application of DL is for marking up dialogues, with each DT naming a speaker, and each DD containing his or her words.". Here's there's no definition or 'key/value', it's just a label and a some associated content.
As far as the W3C public reaction goes I don't think the W3C has ever asked people to do headings using <dl>. This isn't to say that it's inappropriate, but that it's unnecessary.
In summary,
It seems to me that <dl><dt><dd> is unnecessary and a poor substitute for XHTML 2.0's <section> tag. In the meantime I'd probably use <div class="section"> and nest it deeply.
Anyway, that's my thought process.
.Matthew Cruickshank http://holloway.co.nz/ ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
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