by Conrad Weisert
June 1, 2010
©2010, Information Disciplines, Inc.
This article may be circulated freely, as long as the copyright credit is included.
I cringe every time I read an HTML textbook1 or article that
tells its audience about
"unordered lists", the
<ul> tag. What
is an unordered list? Is it a set? Every serious computer scientist and student knows
that a list is an ordered data structure; it has a first element and next elements
until the last element. HTML's
is no exception.
What the writers undoubtedly meant was "unnumbered list". Some books and articles get it right; a web search will turn up lots of entries for both terms, and they appear to mean exactly the same thing.
Of course the entries in a
<ul> list are
ordered. How would web page authors react if a browser, upon seeing
<ul>, did a random shuffle upon the
<li> entries before presenting them
on the user's screen? Now that would truly be unordered.
This may be a minor quibble, but it again illustrates the pervasive amateurishness that characterizes the design of HTML and its derivatives, including CSS and XML. I may have more to say about that later.
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Last modified June 1, 2010