[thelist] semantic markup

Greg Holmes holmegm at tds.net
Thu May 27 12:28:57 CDT 2004


Diane Soini wrote:

> It's not so much how I want it to be rendered as it is 
> that <li> is supposed to be somehow "more correct" than 
> whatever else, as if all lists have to be built as bullet 
> lists.

Well, the default presentation in visual browsers may be a 
bulleted vertical list, but "<ul>" and "<li>" have semantic 
meaning that is not tied to that presentation.

> What I mean is, the <ul> or <ol> is a type of list,
> and it's somehow considered properly semantic to use them 
> to create user interface controls. That doesn't seem 
> semantic to me at all. If anything, the <button> tag seems
> more proper.

Of the choices available, what's wrong with "<li>"? A
list of navigation links *is* a list, and generally an 
unordered list (there is no mandated order of links to follow, nor order of importance to the links).  "<button>" 
doesn't seem quite right, unless you have more of an 
application metaphor than a site metaphor.

Actually, HTML does have an element ("<link>") that is a 
more semantically correct choice for site navigation.  But 
since the most popular browser does not do anything with it,
and users don't expect the navigation to appear in their 
browser UI rather than the page itself, it can only be used 
as a backup.

Greg Holmes



More information about the thelist mailing list