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RE: using list structural markup appropriately

for

From: Jukka Korpela
Date: Oct 7, 2002 11:27PM

Leo Smith wrote:

> This is a very interesting article:
>
> http://www.alistapart.com/stories/taminglists/

Do you mean this:
font: 11px/1.5 Verdana, sans-serif;
in the style sheet used, or the content of the article itself? :-)

Generally, I think the credibility of promoting accessibility is seriously
threatened by accessibility problems on pages that promote accessibility.
(It is true that style sheets, or font size settings in particular, can be
overridden by users. But it's certainly more difficult to most people than
just configuring a browser to use a comfortable font size, as a one-time
effort.)

The article seems to say, basically, that as support to CSS has got better,
there's no reason any more to use various tricks in HTML (as opposite to
logical <ul> or <ol> markup) to get the desired appearance of lists. Well,
that's mostly true. But control freaks will keep noting CSS caveats,
including the fact that CSS can be disabled. And people who always used list
markup for lists won't be affected much, except that we might consider
whether we'd like to tune the appearance, now that it can be done
(relatively) safely.

On the other hand, what I find most relevant in list appearance is none of
the issues in the article (unless I missed something in my quick glimpsing
over it) but the vertical spacing between list items. The spacing affects
the visual readability and should generally be small for small items
(typically less than one line) and larger for lists where the items are
several lines long, to make them visually more separate.

And I can't help noting that the article uses right double angle quotes,
which are quotation marks in several languages, as list bullets in some
examples. I don't see the point; using images (via list-style-image) is more
widely supported and more flexible, letting us use e.g. a real arrow, not a
quotation mark that is supposed to look like an arrow.

--
Jukka Korpela, senior adviser
TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre
http://www.tieke.fi/
Diffuse Business Guide to Web Accessibility and Design for All:
http://www.diffuse.org/accessibility.html


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