making dd and dt adjacent

On 2008-09-01, Daniel Jung <jung (AT) uib (DOT) no> wrote:

Johannes Koch wrote:
Daniel Jung schrieb:
But thinking of it: what would the benefit of a _single_ enclosing dl
be (as opposed to one for each pair)?

A dl ist a definition _list_. What you created is a sequence of one-item
definition lists. It's similar to

ul
li></li
/ul
ul
li></li
/ul

Not quite, since there _is_ a "list" (a pair). The term and the
definition are _listed_, which your examples are not. It depends on how
you define "item". In the sense of "term", you are right.

But anyway, I agree that the <dl>pair</dl><dl>pair</dl> is ugly, and
breaks with an educated reader's intuition and expectations. The
question is just how acceptable the ugliness is.

And besides the ugliness: What is the _benefit_ of it (for parsers)?

What sort of parsers? Are you thinking of search engines or people
trying to script your site?

On Mon, 1 Sep 2008, Daniel Jung wrote:

But thinking of it: what would the benefit of a _single_ enclosing dl be
(as opposed to one for each pair)?

I don't know.
I only know that I could not find a solution for the sample page
http://freenet-homepage.de/prilop/vocabulary.html
with a single enclosing DL that would "work" in the same way
for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Johannes Koch wrote:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/lists.html#edef-DL>:
Definition lists vary only slightly from other types of lists in that
list items consist of two parts: a term and a description.

Thanks

- daniel

On 31 Aug, 22:51, Daniel Jung <j... (AT) uib (DOT) no> wrote:

Hi

I have a glossary for Latin words. URL:http://www.vroma.org/help/glossary..html

The list marked up as paragraphs for each entry, and that looked very
well. We changed it to definition list though, since that is what we
believe is the best semantical markup. Now, want the dd to be right next
to the dt, since the dd contains grammatical properties of the dt which
normally are written right next to the lemma (word entry). Example:

(SHOULD BE)
acta -orum: n. pl. a written record of events

(IS)
acta
* * -orum: n. pl. a written record of events

Aside: We felt that the "-orum" should not be part of the dt since it is
a grammatical property to the entry, not the entry itself.

Having one dl only surrounding the pairs has proven difficult. Right
now, each dt/dd pair is enclosed in a dl container. This is the only way
we could achieve the rendering as we want it (see above, or refer to the
URL). I have tried every way I could think of, using floats and clears
and inlines and margins, but apparantly, I must have missed a combination..

Maybe this combination could do it:

dt { float: left; clear: left }
dd { display: block; margin-bottom: 1em }

Roy A. wrote:

Maybe this combination could do it:

dt { float: left; clear: left }
dd { display: block; margin-bottom: 1em }

Thanks a lot!

- Daniel