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Re: Description lists in PDF using LI, Lbl and LBody

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From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Jul 7, 2021 12:41PM

Thank you everyone for responding. I'll dig deeper into why PAC was showing that issue with my list but not the example Phil gave with terms and definitions. Glad to know there is some acceptance of this approach although it's one that is often not used.

Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Duff Johnson
Sent: Wednesday, July 7, 2021 2:09 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Description lists in PDF using LI, Lbl and LBody

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> Many years ago Duff Johnson had written an article on considering use of PDF list semantics for description lists (e.g. akin to the DL element in HTML).
> http://duff-johnson.com/articles/lists-contrasting-html-with-pdf/ I wanted to get people's thought on using the Lbl and LBody within a LI list item for data pairs as labels and values, etc. I've noted that when I run an example which users words in the Lbl PAC 3 seems to flag it as potentially a misuse of the structure. Thoughts? Is this a good or bad implementation?

The respective specifications (PDF 1.7 and PDF 2.0) are clear that Lbl elements may contain text, so I'm not sure that I understand why there would be a warning. That said I've not looked closely at how this implementation deals with this issue.

> An example might be a word and definition or a data pair such as "Median house price" in the lbl and the cost in $ in the LBody.

PDF's model for lists clearly encompasses this use case.

> It doesn't feel right to me. As Duff said in his article, the <Lbl> tag is intended to specify the semantics of the list, not contain data.

To be clear, the article doesn't suggest (certainly not intentionally!) that Lbl structure elements in PDF should not contain data… just that the contents of the Lbl tag don't determine the list's semantic structure.

Duff.