Definition lists

Suppose you had a single key-value pair - would you use a definition
list to mark that up? For example:

<dl>
<dt>Director</dt>
<dd>Jane Smith</dd>
</dl>

Of course a list can have just one item in it, but is something that can
only ever have one item in it still a list?

Daniele

Scripsit Stefan Ram:

real-not-anti-spam-address (AT) apple-juice (DOT) co.uk (D.M. Procida) writes:
dl
dt>Director</dt
dd>Jane Smith</dd
/dl
Of course a list can have just one item in it, but is something that
can only ever have one item in it still a list?

Actually, this is the only way to write a relation between a
definition term and a definition datum in a non-ambiguous way
using HTML 4.01,

That might be true in a relatively irrelevant sense.

To the extent that it is true, it proves that the markup is semantically
completely wrong, since this is not about defining the term "director".

As explained in detail at http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/def.html ,
there is no adequate markup for definitions in HTML. Just don't try too
hard, and try to write markup that _otherwise_ makes sense.

If you wish to present filmographic information, for example, using a
table is quite adequate, both logically and for rendering purposes. You
can use <th> markup for header-like things like "Director" and <td> for
data cells. Just use CSS to make <th> element content left-aligned.

(IMDb uses more contrived and less logical markup, so they have to take
extra trouble to make the stuff _look_ like a table. "Tableless design"
is absurd when your data contains tabular data!)

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/