Lists or low level headers?

HTML & CSS
1

I often find myself in a position where I’m listing some things out and using a few sentences to explain each list item. However, I often feel that sometimes these are important to my content and definitely could use header tags (h3 mainly).

What do you guys do about this? Forgo the lists and just use <h3> and <p>? I would still like to keep the bullets though.

2

I use All of my headers, I use lists a little bit but not as much as you. you go into great detail. But if its working for you then stick with it.

3

That sounds like the sort of situation where I would use definition lists.

4

huh, never heard of definition lists, I’ll look into these.

5

It’s one of those questions where several solutions are all probably good enough, and the best one depends specifically on your content.

Definition lists can be quite awesome, and while they can’t have list-styles on them, you can have ul’s inside the dd’s so you could do

<dl>
<dt>header/thing</dt>
<dd>
<ul>
list of thingies with bullets
</ul>
</dd>
<dt>another header thing</dt>
… etc

However dt’s only show a semantic relationship between what’s in them and all that’s in the dd, in the way that a term is related to its definition. Looking at your document outline, these will not come up like heading tags will (you can also put heading tags inside dt’s if that makes more sense):
<dt><h3>some header</h3></dt>
<dd>…

but then you start really straying from bare minimum and you end up asking yourself what the dl tags are doing in there anyway… since a heading tag “heads” the content beneath it until either the next header OR the containing context ends.

6

I don’t think that’s allowed … you can have block elements in the <dd>, but <dt> is inline only.

There’s nothing wrong with having block elements in bulleted lists. Something along the lines of:

<ul>
<li><h3>First item</h3>
    <p>Information about the first item</p></li>
<li><h3>Second item</h3>
    <p>Information about the second item</p>
    <p>Lots and lots of it!</p></li>
</ul>
7

I don’t think that’s allowed … you can have block elements in the <dd>, but <dt> is inline only.

Ah, you are correct. Dts are blocks who may only have inlines children.