Michel Fortin wrote:
(Note that everything applying to normal lists in this message could
also apply to definition lists and tables.)
The ongoing thread about a global href attribute versus a block-level
<a> element made me think of a similar situation concerning <ins> and
<del>. How can we markup removed or inserted list items? Here's a
general idea:
<ul>
<ins><li>Some list item</li></ins>
<del><li>Another list item</li></del>
</ul>
But this is invalid. According to the spec the content model for <ul> is
"zero or more <li> elements".
Changing this to allow the above markup has consequences on the DOM: for
instance we could no longer iterate on the content of a list element and
expect to catch all of its list items.
What's more, it's not backwards compatible. I would *love* it if it were
(especially because then fieldset could also go there, and repetition template
attributes wouldn't have to apply to all elements), but current UAs turn
<ul><ins><li>text</li></ins></ul> into <ins></ins><ul><li>text</li></ul>.
I suppose it could be made valid in XML and left explicitly undefined in HTML
with a big red flashing warning to authors not to use it as it'll probably
change in the future, and then in 5 years or so it'll be possible to change
it... But that would be icky. And that assumes there's not already legacy
content that uses it. :(
To avoid the problem <ins> and
<del> could be made global attributes as some have suggested for href.
That would fail when you just wanted to remove a few words from a paragraph. And
having both an element and an attribute would be confusing and, again, icky.
I'm not advocating any solution right now, but I think the spec should
be either changed to allow the above, or to add global attributes, or be
clarified to explicitly disallow <ins> and <del> surrounding list items.
Also, if links are to become applicable to block-level elements, I
suggest it follows the same model.
--
dolphinling
<http://dolphinling.net/>
