A dialogue makes a lot more sense than a list of items which is what
Jens-Uwe is suggesting. I don't believe the usage of a definition list for a
dialogue suggests that DL and DD can be used 'in all manner of creative
ways.' Its primary purpose is to identify a term and its definition. It
works well in a dialogue in that it identifies the speaker, then offsets
what the person has said - you could see this as defining the person by his
speech. It's when we start to get overly creative that we break the rules of
the language and end up with markup which is no longer semantic, but
gibberish - it may render the way we want it to, but it has lost its
original intended meaning.

Jens-Uwe's example could even be put into a P element if he wants it
displayed inline as he put in his first post:

Posted in: Category 1, Category 2

<p>Posted in: Category 1, Category 2</p>

I would suggest a low-level heading (depending on the heading hierarchy of
the site) or simply a paragraph (depending on the context of the list within
the page) for 'posted in' followed by an unordered list if he wants it to
display as a bulleted list, or he can remove the bullets with his stylesheet
if he doesn't want them, but this still remains a list of categories in
which things are posted not a definition of 'posted in':

Posted in:

   - Category 1
   - Category 2

<h5>Posted in:</h5>
<ul>
   <li>Category 1</li>
   <li>Category 2</li>
</ul>

The context will really determine what is best, but either of those options
make more sense than a definition list.

Jason


On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 8:12 PM, Rick Lecoat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> On 13 Jun 2008, at 04:05, Jason Ray wrote:
>
>  Definition lists are for definitions, which this is not.
>>
>
> Not necessarily so. The W3C gives character dialogue as an example usage of
> a DL http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/lists.html#h-10.3 which seems to
> encourage finding less literal uses for it -- and plenty of designers use
> the tag to semantically group collections of semantically-connected text
> chunks/images etc in all manner of creative ways.
>
> --
> Rick Lecoat
> www.sharkattack.co.uk
>
>
>
>
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