Definition Lists: The Bastard Third List Type of HTML.
June 18, 2003, 02:06 pmI was reading Simon Willison's blog this morning and noticed this entry about definition lists in HTML. He linked to this tutorial about using definition lists.
I like definition lists. They're awesome. It's the best way to show an associative array of information. It's just damn logial. It kindof gets on my nerves when people don't use markup that makes a better semantic fit.
I read another entry on Simon's site and looked at a CSS Menu Tutorial. This is something I'm interested in, as using <ul> to display menus is sensible and degrades gracefully. But then I noticed something entirely strange: the author was setting the href attribute for example <a> tags and referred to the pound sign (#) as an octothorp! Where did that come from?
As a self-proclaimed pedant, I can honestly say that “octothorp” is right out. My personal preference is to refer to it simply as “the pound sign,” but I like to pretend that I'd call it “mesh”, from INTERCAL, so that #! is pronounced “mesh wow.”