Foundation HTML5 with CSS3

Constructing Content

Figure 4-14. The list as it appears in a browser with default styling

You can choose to omit the end tag of a list item if it’s immediately followed by another list item, or if there

is no more content in the parent element (meaning it’s the last item in the list, in which case the very next

tag will be the parent list’s end tag). An li element can only occur as a child of the ul and ol elements, or

as a child of the interactive menu element, which is new in HTML5 and covered in Chapter 8.

Required Attributes

There are no required attributes for the li element.

Optional Attributes

 value: If the li is a child of an ol element, this attribute can specify the item’s displayed number

in the list, but doesn’t change the actual list order. The attribute’s value must be a whole integer,

and subsequent items will continue the numbering after a previous item’s value. For example, in

an ordered list of five items where the third item has the attribute value="10", the first two items

will be numbered 1 and 2 and the last three items numbered 10, 11, and 12 (assuming they have

no value attributes of their own).

dl

A description list isn’t merely a collection of items; it’s a collection of items and descriptions of each. Unlike

ordered and unordered lists, a description list doesn’t contain list item (li) elements. Rather, items in a

description list are groupings of terms (dt) and descriptions (dd).

In past versions of HTML, the dl element was a definition list, intended to list terms and their definitions

like you’d find in a glossary. There’s an implied semantic connection between a term and its definition, and

because of this semantic symbiosis, definition lists were frequently used to mark up content that wasn’t

technically a list of terms and definitions. A series of questions and their answers, a list of employees and