Re: ul compact

Lou Montulli (montulli@stat1.cc.ukans.edu)
Wed, 18 Aug 93 0:40:24 CDT


>
> > And what about Marc's (or someone's) suggestion to display a random
> > graphic instead of a bullet. That's pretty easy to add. If there
> > is an ALT attribute the user could also specify there favorite
> > bullet character in text mode clients.
> Seems to me that <DL compact><DT><IMG ALT="o" ...><DD>xyz</DL>
> should work pretty well for that.
>
> --sanders
That won't work quite right. When you have an icon or bullet character
you want the text to be indented in front of the bullet like:

* this is some text that has many words and will line
wrap in many browsers with small window widths and
resizeable terminals.

<DL compact><DT><IMG ALT="o"> etc... will not necessarily be rendered
the way the author intended. Don't quote me on this, but I don't
think <dl compact> will be rendered with the <dt> on the same line
as the <dd> in Xmosaic. (If I'm wrong I'm sorry, I'm at home and can't
get to my portable x-terminal) We could specify explicitly (in the DTD)
that <DL compact> must render the <dt> on the same line as the <dd> when
space permits. But barring that there is no way for an author to
be sure the <IMG> specified will appear as a bullet or a funny
picture about the text. Another problem with <DL compact> is that
there may be arbitrarily many spaces separating the <DT> from the
<dd>. In the linemode browser for instance, the <dt> begins on
line 2 and the <dd> begins on line 30 or 40. Which gives us a rendering
like this:

* this is some text that has many words
and will wrap...

If we had a list structure explicitly defined NOT to have bullets
we could use it and <IMG> tags to show icon lists, but those lists
will not support line wrapping very well. We would end up with
something like:

* this is some text that has many words and will
wrap ...

Which is probably alright for most people, but you haven't met
my editor :).

:lou

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