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Bug 17923 - I would like more clarification on the concept of the term "groups" in regards to the section on definition lists found at: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/grouping-content.html#the-dl-element Quite a bit of time is spent defining these groups, for example: "I
Summary: I would like more clarification on the concept of the term "groups" in regard...
Status: RESOLVED NEEDSINFO
Alias: None
Product: WHATWG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: Unsorted
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: contributor
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2012-07-18 07:17 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2012-07-26 23:30 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2012-07-18 07:17:41 UTC 
This was was cloned from bug 16505 as part of operation convergence.
Originally filed: 2012-03-24 13:02:00 +0000

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 #0   contributor@whatwg.org                          2012-03-24 13:02:49 +0000 
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Specification: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/single-page.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#top
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#top

Comment:
I would like more clarification on the concept of the term "groups" in regards
to the section on definition lists found at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/grouping-content.html#the-dl-element

Quite a bit of time is spent defining these groups, for example:

"If a dl element is empty, it contains no groups."

"If a dl element contains only dd elements, then it consists of one group with
values but no names."

How and/or when do these "groups" come into play?  Are there any current plans
to expose these groups in the DOM, so that dd elements can be accessed from
their sibling dt element?

What would be even more useful would be exposing these groups as
pseudo-elements for CSS rules, allowing each group of dd's in the dt-dd pair
to be styled as a unified block. There are clever solutions for this
currently, but all of them require either floats, positioning, hard-defined
widths, etc.  There is currently no compliant way to style a dd element (and
its dt/dd children) as a table, which  might be possible with pseudo-elements. 

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Comment 1 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2012-07-26 23:30:39 UTC 
I'm not sure how to clarify it further, the entire section is about what the groups are...

> How and/or when do these "groups" come into play?

They're just what the element represents, i.e. its semantics.


> Are there any current plans
> to expose these groups in the DOM, so that dd elements can be accessed from
> their sibling dt element?

We could do that if there's a use case for it.


> What would be even more useful would be exposing these groups as
> pseudo-elements for CSS rules, allowing each group of dd's in the dt-dd pair
> to be styled as a unified block.

Agreed, though a generic solution to this is an issue for the CSSWG.