Re: HTML and Lists

Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 93 18:19:38 +0100
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Message-id: <9301191719.AA04605@www3.cern.ch>
To: Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Subject: Re: HTML and Lists
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Reply-To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch
> (from From: Dan Connolly  Thu, 14 Jan 93 to  www-talk)
>
> Can we do the following instead of using paragraphs in DL?
> 

> <DL>
> <DT>large
> <DT>big
> <DD>Large and big are synonyms.
> <DD>They share a definition.
> <DD>This is the third paragraph of explanation about big
> and large things.
> </DL>
> 

> It appears that the linemode browser generally groks. Thus, let's
> not mess with P's in DL's. (P's in UL's are messy enough to leave
> out too, I guess.)

I don't like this as it is very much at variance with what DL has  
meant up till now.  The tags came from an IBM DTD which shares them I  
thought with eth AAP DTD. I think we should leave them be, as they  
were originally designed allowing pairs of <dt> <dd> but <p> within  
the <DD>. I must admit the NeXT browser can only produce a void  
"term" to make a new paragraph at the moment.

From dave's message:
| I support:
| 

|     o   DD terms can include <P> breaks
| 

|     o   LI terms can include <P> breaks for UL and OL lists

I agree

|     o   DT terms can be arbitrarily long and are wrapped onto the  
line below

You have to allow anything (almost) to be arbitrarily long as things  
will be egnerated automatically from other things, and arbitrary  
limits are then a pain.
 

| It might be an improvement to emulate the approach used by Latex as  
in:
...
|   TERMS ARE IN A BIG FONT while their definitions follow in the  
normal font
|     and wrap round with a margin indent.
| 

| versus the HTML guidelines which suggest:
| 

|   TERMS ARE IN A BIG FONT       while their defintions follow in  
the normal
|                                 font and wrap round with a margin  
indent.


This is just a preferance of the reader and the client app writer.


| I would further like to have the freedom to embed lists, e.g. OL in  
UL and
| vice versa, but allowing only one level of embedding, e.g.

I think we should stick to a non-nested structure for HTML and get it  
registered as a simple format.  Nested structured into HTML2 which we  
can all discuss when HTML is registered with IANA. Reasonable?


| My implementation of lists is fairly relaxed whilst being able to  
support
| smooth scrolling of arbitrary length HTML documents. The processing  
demands
| for this require the browser to be able parse backwards -

This could be regarded as a weird way of doing things though it  
doesn't use any memeory at all I see. Most people would I think just  
store the lot.

 

| Cheers for now (the Pub is bekoning)

A'roight fer some, mate..  ;-)

| Dave Raggett

Tim Berners-Lee