Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 02/02/06 08:05

Stan McCann <me@stanmccann.us> wrote:

> Advice is often seen on this group to
> not choose an element because of it's default style.

Right. You should not choose an element just because it "looks right"
on a particular browser, or on several browsers, even if the default
presentation is specifically recommended in specifications.

> Isn't the reverse true as well?

It depends on what you mean by reversing.

> Don't choose ul because of the default
> style? Don't choose address because of it's defaut style?

It's a reasonable practical principle to consider the default
presentational effects of using a particular element _when you have a
choice_ that makes sense semantically.

For example, any list can trivially be described as a table, either as
a one-row table or as a one-column table. In fact, something that
logically consists of a sequence of lines could be marked up in several
ways, and there is in general no particular reason to favor one over
another _semantically_:
- <ul>
- <ol>
- <table> with one row
- <table> with one column
- a sequence of <div> elements, perhaps enclosed inside an outer <div>
though the last option should be taken as the last resort, since it has
least structure. We could also consider <pre> or using just <br>
between lines, but these are less satisfactory since they do not even
make the lines _elements_.

(Note, by the way, that using <address> as the container, the _only_
way to indicate the line structure is to use <br>. This is one of the
symptoms of the poor design of the <address> element in HTML.)

Given these options, it seems reasonable to make a choice at least
partly according to the default rendering of elements.

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

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