Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 05/04/07 12:30

Scripsit dorayme:

>>> I've got a large number of names (373 in fact) currently in .txt
>>> ready to cut and paste into a page.
>>
>> But why would you do that?
>
> Surely there could be many good reasons.

Maybe there could, but good examples are hard to find.

> For example, a jailed
> identity thief might want to list all his victims to boast about
> his exploits or indeed, to make a public confession and apology.

Where I live (within the European Union), that would be a crime, according
to legislation based on the directive on protection of personal data, among
other things.

> On a more
> cheerful note, wedding sites where the guests are listed.

That would be illegal too, unless you have a freely given permission based
on sufficient information, from each and every guest.

> Or, to remember something I once did, just float the <ul>s, pick
> a reasonable number of names to put in each ul that would almost
> for sure not to need vertical scrolling on most machines.

You mean dividing something that is logically one list, into a set of <ul>
elements. Logic aside, that's simply unnecessarily complex.

> you even get to keep an alphabetical ordering which a user will
> quickly get to grasp.

You get an alphabetic order if you just put the names in alphabetic order
initially. You probably mean that you get it _columnwise_, but why would
that be superior, or even desirable? We normally read lines from top to
bottom but left to right within each line, and why should this be an
exception?

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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