I think the ALA “Taming Lists” article does deal with this, i.e. using CSS to semantically structure *inline* lists using ul or ol. So, why is there a view here that ul is “fine” for sidebar navigation lists, but not for horizontal top nav lists? This seems to be an artefact of HTML’s default styling of ul as a vertical, bulleted thing – this in itself is a narrow interpretation of the concept of a “list”, and it seems to have deeply affected our perception of lists on the web (understandably). The great thing about CSS is, it gives us the tools to liberate us from the preconceptions built into default HTML visual rendering (sorry, stating the obvious there a bit!).

I guess the issue comes down to people browsing CSS sites with old browsers, who see what they might have expected as a horizontal top nav as a vertical list. (I assume this isn’t an issue for screen readers: they just read list items out sequentially, and the visual axis aspect has no bearing – a good way of thinking to release from the “vertical = list” assumption.) Again, this is contestable – horizontal main nav *is* a widespread convention, but there are sites with top-level links down the side.

Anyway, I’ll stop there as I guess this is an old debate without much steam in it – just thought this aspect needed to pop its head up here :)

If each blog entry title is put into a heading tag, why couldn’t assistive-technology make a “skip to next heading” or “skip to next heading of the same level” functions? Why water down the effectiveness of lists.

Yes, many blogs could be pure lists, but many are in fact long narratives organized by date. Would you put the text of Lord of the Rings or of The Diary of Anne Frank in a list?

I’m still torn over the approach. Tantek is sold on it. I see some benefits and logic to making each entry a list item.

But something in me is uncomfortable with wrapping a <ul> and <li> around everything (or in Tantek’s case, an <ol>). For some reason, it reminds me of the days when we wrapped a table around everything just to control layout.

The benefits of moving each entry to a list item might be more apparent in screen readers and other assitive devices. Screen readers will often encounter a list, and announce how many items are included in the list. This allows the user to decide how to rapidly to move through the list, or maybe even to skip it entirely. If a screen reader allows the user to “jump” from one list item to the next (without the use of traditional name anchors), then I’d see this as a very good thing, and a reason to convert each <div class=”entry”> to a <li>. It would allow a user to skip multiple entries and get to one they hadn’t read.

But it all comes down to the title of this post. Is there a point where lists are simply overused? I don’t know the answer to that one.

What would be interesting for me: What did your ‘internal debate’ about further use of list-items (last paragraf) result in?