{"id":166,"date":"2010-06-14T20:57:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-14T20:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/?p=166"},"modified":"2015-01-14T18:35:40","modified_gmt":"2015-01-14T18:35:40","slug":"dita-lists-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/?p=166","title":{"rendered":"DITA Lists, Part Two"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today it occurred me to have a look at the DITA Architecture Specification source to see how the people behind the spec would tag a list; as some of you know, this was the subject of my recent blog<\/a> entry. There are a number of lists in that spec, many with introductory paragraphs, so it’s a pretty obvious way to find out, right? Well, after the examples in that spec, maybe.<\/p>\n

Anyway, this is how they do it:<\/p>\n

<p>Introductory para:
<ul>
<li>Item<\/li>
<li>Item<\/li>
<\/ul>
<\/p><\/p>\n

This was one of my guesses, and I have to say that it’s better than any of the alternatives I could come up with. It’s not good markup, though, in my opinion, as it says that semantically, a paragraph is sort of a block-level superclass, a do-it-all and one that you must use if you need that introduction.<\/p>\n

But then, why limit yourself to lists? Why aren’t notes tagged like that? Or definition lists, or images, or tables? Think about it. Doesn’t this feel just a little bit like a cop-out to you? It does to me. It feels like the author realised that he needed that wrapper but there was nothing he could cling to, other than this construction.<\/p>\n

I’m not saying that my way is the only way (obviously it’s not) but this bothers me because it muddies the semantic waters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today it occurred me to have a look at the DITA Architecture Specification source to see how the people behind the spec would tag a list; as some of you know, this was the subject of my recent blog entry. There are a number of lists in that spec, many with introductory paragraphs, so it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}