Blog » What about headings and paragraphs?
- Posted: Jan 5th 2005, 01:15
Just a quickie, purely because the spamming I receive from the mailing lists I read is really wearing me down. In fact Charl van Niekerk made a good post entitled Retaining Heading Structure Integrity which is a totally worthwhile read and totally on track.
Back to my point however, if there truly is one, with regards to the mailing lists: what is the obsession with the definition list element? Why is everyone obsessed with style hooks and supposed semantics. Stop toking on crack and give it back to the gerbil. OK, OK. Perhaps it is acceptable occasionally, but what about headings and paragraphs? They convey a relationship too. That of a heading a paragraph following it. Or anything for that matter. A heading followed by tabular data, list items, images, objects, quotes and sonnets. Stop putting everything in a definition list. Slow down for a second and think. KISS.
I’m not saying that using definition lists with a little bit of a liberal license is intolerable and prohibit-able. Just that I’m tired of seeing:
<dl>
<dt>Discussion on potatoes</dt>
<dd>Potatoes are like apples that grow in the ground</dd>
<dd><img alt="The apple is green and hangs from trees" src="http://example.org/appleshanging/apple1" /></dd>
<dd>Some redundant description used as a style hook</dd>
<dt>Talk of the gerbils</dt>
<dd>
<p><q>Yeah man, toke on this,</q> said the gerbil.</p>
<p>Gerbils are crack-addled.</p>
</dd>
<dd>Another redundancy. Damn unemployment is getting bad in the shanty-town</dd>
</dl>
Anyway, stop going over the top. There’s a rich markup language out there waiting for you to use it.