Some Random Dude

Lists in lists. Trees. It’s basically mimicking the XML tree structure. In my opinion it repeats the semantic information xhtml already provides. And when you label content chunks with dl/dd/dt you’re acutally mixing up structure with content. Do users really need to be told it’s a header, a menu, or a site’s content ? Souldn’t it be implicitly told with their content, position in the page flow, inner xhtml structuring or presentation ?

Of course everything could be named that way. Just replace all div-id-content with dl-dd-dt or all xhtml nodes with li?-ul. Plus I think lists are most suited to hold small chunks of information and not whole layout sections. Well, no as small as to list content words, of course ! ;)

I don’t think DIVs are a problem when used properly. I’m also against “divitis” but DIVs have a meaning indeed, DIV stands for “division” and what’s wrong with dividing your content in divisions/ areas?

Using list for layout as experiment is fine but I still think divs make more sense for layout than lists. I’m sure that the guys who wrote the specification for lists weren’t thinking in employing them as layout elements, as they didn’t for tables.

Please don’t take me wrong. It’s a great experiment however I think you misundertood the meaning of divs.

just thought i’d let you know 30day artist resumes in march.

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welcome back.

I find this an interesting approach but ultimately no better then div based layout. I can see the argument for both but I tend to agree Thibaut in that a list is more suited to short bits of data. As an example you don’t think of a magazine, or novel as a list even though it does follow a hierarchy based structure. It is more implied as James stated.

I do think that this is a good experiment and I think that while it is fundamentally not better then div based layout it is also not worse either. I have heard that with XHTML 2.0 that they will be fading out the div in place of new tags that are specific to design but we shall see. Also who know when it will be supported fully by all major browsers? Keep up the good work. I am glad to see that people are experimenting and pushing the limit of the code :).

Jeff
Thanks for the comment – I totally understand where you’re coming from. I personally think that the notion of a list is more flexible than your definition, but it’s merely a different of opinion.

Great thoughts, thanks again.

Okay, if I understand correctly, your thing was using list instead of div’s to organize content, right? But you used div’s to do this website! Isn’t that a contradiction in you message? If list are more flexible, then why did you use div’s to create this website here?