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Re: Navigation lists and headers - best practise?

for

From: Karl Groves
Date: Aug 28, 2007 12:40PM

> -----Original Message-----
> From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of
> Austin, Darrel
> Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 2:16 PM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Navigation lists and headers - best practise?
>
> > Here we go again. It's not just semantically wrong. It's even
> > syntactically wrong, since dt elements allows inline
> content only (not
> > surprisingly, since terms are words, not blocks).
>
> Ah, yes...good point.
>
> That said, I do argue that DL are very semantic for menus.
> The definition itself accommodates many uses outside of your
> generic dictionary context of definitions.
>
> And, at that point, while H2s might be more accessible, I'd
> argue that they are less semantic. Headers are for content.
> Not navigation.


Not that Jukka needs anyone to come to his defense, but it seems like you're
trying to have your cake and eat it, too.

On one hand you're attempting to argue for semantics ("Headers are for
content, not navigation"), while trying to argue a case which is a semantic
misuse of elements. To argue for the use of a "definition list" as being
for anything *other* than for a list of terms and definitions is without a
doubt a use of the definition list for a purpose it was not intended to
serve.

Despite the fact that the current W3C page[1] discusses that "definition
lists may have other applications", the archived documents[2] do not include
this statement. To me, this is simply further evidence that definition lists
were intended solely to mark up that which their name pretty explictly
states: definitions. Comments embedded within the HTML 4.01 Strict DTD
itself even state, "definition lists - DT for term, DD for its definition".

Despite the fact that a definition list appears highly appropriate for any
list of key->value pairs or semantic grouping of like items, that was not
their intent.





1 - http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/lists.html

2 - http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_9.html
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/1995-archive/Lists.html
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970708/struct/lists.html

3 - http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd


Karl