Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 02/02/06 20:11

Stan McCann <me@stanmccann.us> wrote:

> Toby Inkster <usenet200601@tobyinkster.co.uk> wrote in
> news:h8p8b3-v6s.ln1@ophelia.g5n.co.uk:
- -
>> Don't choose UL for an address because the order of items in an
>> address is semantically important. Default style doesn't come into
>> it.
>
> Oops, you're right.

I don't think so. The difference between <ol> and <ul> is basically the
styling of list markers. The idea that <ol> is ordered and <ul> is
unordered does not hold water. It would be just as incorrect for a
browser to reorder the items of a <ul> as it would be incorrect to
reorder the paragraphs in a sequence of paragraphs or the rows of
table. There is nothing in HTML specifications that says that elements
_must_ be rendered in succession or that the order of table rows is
significant; it is more or less just common sense, and so is the
significance of the order of items in a <ul> list.

The difference between <ol> and <ul> has some semantic flavor, though.
We normally use <ol> to _emphasize_ the order and to make it explicit,
perhaps for the purpose of referring to items by their numbers (or
letters).

> I'm beginning to believe that there may not be a semantically
> correct element

There are _several_ semantically correct elements, or let us say
elements that are not semantically incorrect. There is no element
_dedicated_ for address markup (in general), though.

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

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