[thelist] Re: Compact definition list

[Clive R Sweeney]

Manuel Noriega suggests I try "dd, dt {display:inline;}". I'd already
tried that, but on his suggestion I tried it again and, while it didn't
do the trick by itself, I started playing a bit and think I may have
something that *almost* does what I need.

Here's how it works. The "display:inline" results in a list with no line
breaks at all and no hanging indent effect. I added a "<br />" after
every "</dd>" to get the required line breaks. To get the hanging
indent, I gave the "<dl>" a margin of 2em and then gave the "<dt>" a
negative margin of the same amount. Right now it's working consistently
in IE6 Win, IE5 Mac, Netscape 7, Firebird 7, Opera 7. You can see it at
http://www.designshift.com/problems/glossary_solution1.html.

All in all, a nice, semantically correct solution, I think. But there's
one thing still missing - the extra space between definitions. I could
try "<br /><br />" after each definition, but that's too much space. I'd
like to get something more like a "break and a half", similar to the
non-definition list version at
http://www.designshift.com/problems/glossary1.html. Am I being too
fussy?

Thanks, Manuel.


-----Original Message-----
From: M.G.Noriega [mailto:manuel at simplelogica.net] 
Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2003 4:30 PM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org; clive at designshift.com
Subject: Re: [thelist] Compact definition list


Clive R Sweeney wrote:

>I'm trying to create a glossary page. The original page contains a few
>thousand entries (I'm told) and the resulting download size for this 
>one page is over 900KB. Apparently it was created from a Word doc and 
>so there is some nasty "msonormal" markup/css. Obviously I could reduce

>the page size significantly by optimizing the markup and CSS. A first 
>short
>  
>
<snip />

Just try

dd, dt {display:inline;}

should work :)

-- 
Manuel González Noriega
Simplelógica, construcción web @ http://simplelogica.net Logicola es el
weblog de Simplelógica http://simplelogica.net/logicola/