Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 02/02/06 07:50

Stan McCann <me@stanmccann.us> wrote:

> I guess I had never really read the docs on address;
> you are also slightly off on the definition. It doesn't have to be
> the address of the author, but contact information for the
> document, which is not always the same.

To stay on the safe side, we should expect them to be the same, since
the summary at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/index/elements.html
says that <address> is "information on author", and the DTD comment
says the same.

> As for the
> default display to be italics. Irrelevant. I can style it any way
> I want.

With the usual CSS caveats. Did you forget them? My point is that by
using <address> you take the unnecessary risk of having the content
displayed in italics in some browsing situations. When you would use
<address> for contact information on the author, the risk might be
worth taking, but why would you take a risk when there is nothing to be
won? (The reason why the risk might be worth taking is somewhat
theoretical: given the definition of <address>, it is _possible_ that
some software actually uses it according to the definition, e.g.
letting the user access the author's contact information with a simple
command instead of looking around the page to find it.)

> As for the original question, then yes, I suppose a table would be
> ok, or as I said I'd played with a bit, maybe a list. Being items
> listed in one column, I think I may go with list.

With a list (<ul> or <ol>), you would have the problem of _default_
rendering, with bullets or numbers. An attempt to remove the bullets or
numbers with CSS might or might not be successful.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

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