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RE: How to display data correct semantically

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From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Sep 15, 2005 1:20AM

> Now my question is this - at the top level without any of the
> replies visible the data is tabular. at the second level
> with the replies visible the data continues to be tabular but
> is also a list as well - - or is it?
>
> How should I mark it up so that it is correct?

I've run into this too. What you are doing is showing heirarchacal,
tabular data.

Alas, in HTML, we have tables, and we have nested lists. So it's not
easy to combine them.

In the past, I've stuck with the table, and then visually indented to
show the hierarchy, but, of course, that looses some of the semantic
meaning.

Some have recommended that your markup look like this:

TOPIC
[TOPIC] reply 1
[TOPIC > reply 1] reply 2

And so on. Anything in brackets you could then hide with styles so it
doesn't show visually but still retains the relationship between parent
and children. However, I would imagine that would get REALLY verbose if
you are reading through heavily nested threads.

-Darrel