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From: Kristina Floyd
Date: Mon, Sep 12 2005 8:00AM
Subject: How to display data correct semantically
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Hello listee's

I have a semantics question for you.

I have a message board that I am creating the prototype HTML pages for.

<http://24.m-corp.com/id20-discussion-bd.jpg>;
The first page of the discussion board displays all the top level topics
plus the name of the person that posted the topic, the number of posts
and the date of the last post.

<http://24.m-corp.com/id21-discussion-bd.jpg>;
When the user clicks on the topic he/she wishes to view a second page
opens showing a list of the replies to the topic, each indented a little
to show it is a reply to the one above.

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?

Tia
Kristina

From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Thu, Sep 15 2005 1:20AM
Subject: RE: How to display data correct semantically
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> 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