Why are you using pipes in the first place? Why is a <li> with
border-right : 1px solid black; styled on it and spaced out with margins
and padding not sufficient? This smacks of using for layout.
Samuel
Geoff Pack wrote:
Christian Montoya wrote:
If you heard what pipe separators sound like in a screen reader, you
wouldn't think they were semantic. Just because they have a long
history doesn't make them machine-readable.
Well, I have heard what they sound like when Opera reads them out, which is no
biggie. And I wasn't implying that semantic = machine-readable.
Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
Asterisks have a long history of being used to denote required form
fields...but that doesn't make them semantic either. Just
like the pipe
separators, it's a case of a *visual* convention from the
print world.
They do not have meaning on their own, but their meaning has been
inferred. The same inference happens when we used to use <font
size="+3"> instead of a proper <h1> or whatever to denote a heading...
Well, if it's a convention, then it *has* meaning. The question is then whether
the meaning is clear enough, to a wide enough selection of the audience. With
HTML, we can also ask if there is a 'correct' way to mark-up the meaning. But
incorrect mark-up != un-semantic in the broader sense, only that the semantics
of the contents do not match the semantics of the mark-up.
For asterixes, the meaning is the same as a footnote: "see below for
clarification". It's a pre-web in-page hyperlink. On a web page you can make the
link even more explicit by adding an href to the footer text, but it's not necessary
because everyone already *knows* what it means. It is just as semantic as writing
'required' next to a label (Required what?). The meaning is the same.
As for lists, the pipe separated menu list is perfectly clear to most people.
What is missing is a clean way to mark it up with HTML. You could use an
unordered list, styled inline, but that is overkill in many cases, and not an
useable if you want the list to be inline when styles are missing or turned off.
Geoff.
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