..

[Neal]

Re: ..

Yikes! My client is getting assertive!

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 17:24:19 -0400, Harlan Messinger
<h.messinger@co mcast.net> wrote:
[color=blue]
> "Neal" <neal413@yahoo. com> wrote in message
> news:opr9rb5rjq 6v6656@news.ind ividual.net...[color=green]
>> Remember, dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive[/color]
> Erm...usually the point made is that they are not prEscriptive...[/color]

One lousy letter off... :) But you know what I mean.

[Brian]

Re: ..

Neal wrote:
[color=blue]
> would you advocate doing[/color]

This is purely academic, since backward compatability requires us to
use <ul> and <ol>. But I've thought about this before, so here goes:
[color=blue]
> unordered lists like:[/color]

<list>
<item>Lawyers </item>
<item>Guns</item>
<item>Money</item>
</list>

[color=blue]
> ordered lists like:[/color]

<list type="ordered">
<item>Bite</item>
<item>Chew</item>
<item>Swallow </item>
</list>

Definition list. I hadn't thought of this. Perhaps we could have
been parsimonious here, too, but I don't know. A definition list is
a sort of flexible array. I think it would actually be better to
have something like <dl>, but something more geneneral, to be used
for more than defining terms. How about complexlist?

<complexlist>
<item>Acronym<i tem>
<itemdesc>A word web authors argue about</itemdesc>
<item>Usenet</item>
<itemdesc>A place web authors argue</itemdesc>
</complexlist>

For that matter, an optional grouping element would be nice:

<complexlist>

<listgroup>
<item>Acronym<i tem>
<itemdesc>A word web authors argue about</itemdesc>
<itemdesc>
A word formed by taking the first letter
of several words; example: radar
</itemdesc>
<itemdesc>An element supported by Gatesware</itemdesc>
</listgroup>

<listgroup>
<item>Usenet</item>
<itemdesc>A place web authors argue</itemdesc>
</listgroup>

</complexlist>
[color=blue]
> We can even replace dl with this by nesting a list.
>
> <l>
> <li>Acronym
> <l>
> <li>A word web authors argue about</li>
> </l>
> </li>
> <li>Usenet
> <l>
> <li>A place web authors argue</li>
> </l>
> </li>
> </l>[/color]

Interesting approach, but it seems something is lost.
[color=blue]
> at least in the case of ol, there's another consideration - again,
> the fact that users in a no-CSS environment need usable rendering,[/color]

I don't advocate eliminating the semantic notion of an ordered list.
Only that I'd have tried to keep is simple and self-documenting: a
<list> item, with an attribute type to declare the list as
containing ordered <item>s. CSS could be used to suggest Roman or
Arabic numbers, or letters, or....

--
Brian (remove ".invalid" to email me)

http://www.tsmchughs.com/

[Stan Brown]

Re: ..

"Neal" <neal413@yahoo. com> wrote in
comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.stylesheets:[color=blue]
>On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 12:44:22 +0200, Berislav Lopac
><berislav.lopa c@dimedia.hr> wrote:
>[color=green]
>> [quoted text muted][color=darkred]
>>> title="Cascadin g Style Sheets">CSS</acronym>-based design.[/color]
>>
>> "CSS" is not an acronym, though.[/color][/color]

Oh gawd. Not this again.
[color=blue]
>That entirely depends on your definition of "acronym". Several dependable
>dictionaries I've consulted define "acronym" without mention of it having
>to be pronounceable.[/color]

Anyway, "CSS" is pronounceable. Say "kiss" without the vowel. :-)

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA

http://OakRoadSystems.com/

HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Stan Brown]

Re: ..

"Chris Morris" <c.i.morris@dur ham.ac.uk> wrote in
comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.stylesheets:[color=blue]
>If it's an unordered list, then the final display order
>should be arbitrary. I don't know of any UAs that sort the output into
>a different order (alphabetic?) but if it's a real UL, and not an OL
>that has "list-style-type: disc" or similar, it shouldn't matter.[/color]

I don't agree. A list can be unordered in the sense that we don't
want numbered items, but still ordered by importance or other
criteria. (In school I learned not to number items in a list unless
I plan refer to them by number.)

Absent direct instruction from the author, I don't believe any
browser should reverse the order of two bits of text.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA

http://OakRoadSystems.com/

HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Harlan Messinger]

Re: ..

Neal <neal413@yahoo. com> wrote:
[color=blue]
>On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 17:18:20 -0400, Harlan Messinger
><h.messinger@c omcast.net> wrote:
>[color=green]
>>
>> "Neal" <neal413@yahoo. com> wrote in message
>> news:opr9rborfk 6v6656@news.ind ividual.net...[color=darkred]
>>> For me, the difference between OL and UL is that items in an OL are
>>> intentionally sequential, whether in order of importance, relevance,
>>> time,
>>> or other parameter(s). UL, on the other hand, could be put into other
>>> orders if the author so desired, but this is not to say there's any
>>> reason
>>> a UA should re-order a UL.[/color]
>>
>> If there is no reason at all why a UA would do anything differently
>> because
>> the order of my list happens to be arbitrary (and if, in fact, the UA
>> really
>> ought NOT to do anything differently), then there's no more reason to
>> make
>> that fact explicit in markup than there is to indicate with markup that
>> the
>> information contained in the list makes me sad, or that it was dictated
>> to
>> me over the phone instead of copied and pasted from a Word document.[/color]
>
>Well, would you advocate doing unordered lists like:
>
><l>
> <li>Lawyers</li>
> <li>Guns</li>
> <li>Money</li>
></l>
>
>and ordered lists like:
>
><l>
> <li>1. Bite</li>
> <li>2. Chew</li>
> <li>3. Swallow</li>
></l>
>
>?[/color]

I'm advocating what I said previously: have only one kind of list
element, and still provide the control over markers that exists now.
[color=blue]
>
>We can even replace dl with this by nesting a list.[/color]

This follows from what I said about not differentiating ordered lists
from unordered lists in the markup only if you ignore the reason I
gave for saying that.
[color=blue]
>
><l>
> <li>Acronym
> <l>
> <li>A word web authors argue about</li>
> </l>
> </li>
> <li>Usenet
> <l>
> <li>A place web authors argue</li>
> </l>
> </li>
></l>
>
>I can actually respect such a view - that the three li's are purely
>presentation al and have no semantic value.
>
>But at least in the case of ol, there's another consideration - again, the
>fact that users in a no-CSS environment need usable rendering, and doing
>numbered lists like in my imaginary scenario above results in a poorer
>rendering than a traditional ol.[/color]

True, but it's you who made up the way of producing item numbering
that you display above. *I* never suggested it was a good way.

I think you ought to reread my original comment, because you are now
consistently ignoring a key part of it: "I agree with LIST instead of
OL and UL, but I don't know about the type attribute. Indicating that
the markers should be bullets or roman numerals or whatever takes care
of that. While bulleted lists don't have their order indicated by the
markers, they are nevertheless ordered in the sense that it would be
unacceptable for a UA to render the items in different order from the
one in which they appear in the HTML."
[color=blue]
>I don't feel the divorce of content and
>presentation need go so far that non-CSS visual users must be faced with
>poorer rendering because no attention is placed to their environment's
>usability.[/color]

You already agreed that, once CSS is used to determine the marker
type, UAs aren't going to distinguish between OL and UL lists, so what
poorer rending are you talking about now?

--
Harlan Messinger
Remove the first dot from my e-mail address.
Veuillez ôter le premier point de mon adresse de courriel.

[Ian Watts]

Re: ..

Neal wrote:
[color=blue]
> Surely we can agree on a few things here, though: an acronym can also be
> considered an abbr; IE won't do abbr; no UA's I'm aware of do anything
> special with acronym that they don't do with abbr (other than IE
> observing it and not the other). So I'm, frankly, inclined to look the
> other way if acronym is misused (which I'm not convinced it is here
> anyway), being that there no known loss in accessibility or usability.[/color]

I use (misuse) acronym to highlight words in my text that I want to give
a definition of meaning for, on a school website. Is this incorrect
(well, I suppose I know it is incorrect). But is it forgivable?

[Alan J. Flavell]

Re: ..

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, Ian Watts wrote:
[color=blue]
> I use (misuse) acronym to highlight words in my text that I want to give
> a definition of meaning for, on a school website. Is this incorrect[/color]

Yes. <dfn title="blah blah"> would be[1] an appropriate markup
for a defining instance; where the HTML spec offers an appropriate
element, then it's ipso facto incorrect to (mis)use anything else.

[1] along with appropriate CSS styling proposal(s), obviously (some
kind of dotted border seems to be a conventional choice).

[Brian]

Re: ..

Ian Watts wrote:
[color=blue]
> I use (misuse) acronym to highlight words in my text that I want
> to give a definition of meaning for, on a school website. Is this
> incorrect (well, I suppose I know it is incorrect).[/color]

Exactly so. A. Flavell's solution seems pretty logical.
[color=blue]
> But is it forgivable?[/color]

Not if you knew better. ;-)

--
Brian (remove ".invalid" to email me)

http://www.tsmchughs.com/

[Ian Watts]

Re: ..

Brian wrote:[color=blue]
> Ian Watts wrote:[/color]
[color=blue]
>[color=green]
>> But is it forgivable?[/color]
>
>
> Not if you knew better. ;-)
>[/color]

I do now - thanks ;-)

[Alan J. Flavell]

Re: ..

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004, Stan Brown wrote:
[color=blue][color=green][color=darkred]
> >> "CSS" is not an acronym, though.[/color][/color]
>
> Oh gawd. Not this again.[/color]

It's OK, I've made my point that "acronym" has a precise technical
meaning which might have been useful in HTML, but was sabotaged even
by some of the drafters of HTML4; and a sloppy usage that is of no
practical use to anyone. There's nothing to be gained by spinning it
out, but maybe there are some newcomers who weren't aware of the past
discussions.