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In the examples for "4.4.4 The article element", the nested example uses comments in a blog. The code for the comments should use <ol><li> as comments are an ordered list of reactions. <section> <h1>Comments</h1> <ol> <li> <article> <footer> <p>Posted by: George Washington</p> <p><time pubdate datetime="2009-10-10T19:10-08:00"></time></p> </footer> <p>Yeah! Especially when talking about your lobbyist friends!</p> </article> </li> <li> <article> <footer> <p>Posted by: George Hammond</p> <p><time pubdate datetime="2009-10-10T19:15-08:00"></time></p> </footer> <p>Hey, you have the same first name as me.</p> </article> </li> </ol> </section>
<ol> isn't the only source of ordering semantics in markupdocument order is itself semantic. (You can't reorder the <p> elements in an article without destroying meaning, and the same goes for comments.) So it's not correct to say that comments must be marked up in an <ol>.
(In reply to comment #1) > <ol> isn't the only source of ordering semantics in markupdocument order is > itself semantic. (You can't reorder the <p> elements in an article without > destroying meaning, and the same goes for comments.) So why bother with <ol> ? IMHO, <ol> indicates a strong importance to the content order, <p> indicates a weak importance, and <ul> indicated no importance at all (I can remove some <p> in articles without loosing too much data/ideas -- that is what is done when resuming a book in school, I can't remove an item into a <ol> without changing the result). And in the case of comments, order is very important. > So it's not correct to say that comments must be marked up in an <ol>. I did not write "must" but "should".
Using ol for items this long does not solve any real problem. It will probably confuse users of screen reading software that will hear "list item" and then a complete comment. It will introduce problems with CSS, since not everyone is using CSS resets. It will make the markup more bloated. In short: No benefit and lots of trouble. And the source order by itself carries enough meaning. The list element is not supposed to arbitrarily say "for this the order is really, really important". And since people nowadays seem to abuse lists almost as much as the abused tables a few years ago, this would be encouraging the wrong kind of behavior.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: see comment 1 and comment 2. Comments aren't a list.
mass-moved component to LC1