Paul Bennett wrote:
<dl id="testimonial">
<dt>Joe Coyle, President, www.coylemedical.com</dt>
<dd>Mr. Cisneros and his team have an extraordinary talent for customer
communication, market vision, and web pageb design.</dd>
<dl>
There seems to be a tendency lately to use definition lists for way more
than I think they're supposed to be used for.
I've found a couple of descriptions of what a definition list is
supposed to be:
<http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/lists.html#h-10.3>
"Definition lists vary only slightly from other types of lists in that
list items consist of two parts: a term and a description. The term is
given by the DT element and is restricted to inline content. The
description is given with a DD element that contains block-level content."
and
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/lists.html>
Definition lists, created using the DL element, generally consist of a
series of term/definition pairs (although definition lists may have
other applications). Thus, when advertising a product, one might use a
definition list:
I think the some of the confusion stems from the naming and the
description of the list type and the list items.
In the first example the spec states:
"list items consist of two parts: a term and a description"
In the second:
"(list items) generally consist of a series of term/definition pairs"
The second description continues with:
"although definition lists may have other applications"
What are these "other" applications? The spec doesn't specifically
state, but it does offer the following as an examples:
"Another application of DL, for example, is for marking up dialogues,
with each DT naming a speaker, and each DD containing his or her words."
and
"when advertising a product, one might use a definition list"
That is a vague and somewhat conflicting guide. The list type is dubbed
"definition", but at almost every turn, the specification leans more
toward the idea of "description". Defining a term and describing a term
are completely separate concepts at the core, but the lines do blur a
bit. If definition lists would have been called "description lists",
having the exact same specifications, we wouldn't be having this debate
and the world would be a happy place.
In the above example, is this (semantically) equivalent to saying
that the definition of 'Joe Coyle, President, www....'
In the example I gave, I was following the speaker-dialog
path--describing what the speaker said. The content is obviously more
accurately described as a quote than a dialog, but that can easily be
worked into the <dd> to add even more semantic meaning.
The bottom line is that we have to work with what we have been given,
which is not allot, so do the best you can.
--
Best regards,
M. Wilson
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