Sams Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours- P6: Times have changed, thankfully, since those Dark Ages of CSS. All major browsers as well as some minor ones have increased support for Cascading Style Sheets in the latest versions. Web developers are aware of CSS and the vital role they play in designing great Web pages, and presumably you’ve got some idea of how important they are if you’ve bought this book. | Hour 14 Lists Not all information is organized into paragraphs of text. Many types of Web content are actually lists of information including navigation menus product feature lists glossaries and step-by-step instructions. Because of the way information is read on the Web the use of lists can be one of the most effective and direct methods of conveying information to an audience. Styling lists well can also enhance their usefulness. In this hour you ll learn How lists are formatted in CSS What the different types of lists are and how they re coded in HTML How other elements can be displayed as lists Which CSS properties change the shape and appearance of bullets How to set the counting methods of numbered lists List Formatting Before I discuss how CSS browsers display lists I ll define some terms that will be important this hour. 234 Hour 14 A list is just a set of information that has been organized into discrete pieces called list items. A list can be ordered which means that the order in which the items are presented is important or it can be unordered indicating that there isn t any specific order to the items or that order isn t important. A third type of list is the definition list also called a dictionary list these consist of pairs of shorter words and longer explanations. Types of HTML Lists Lists in HTML are usually indicated by appropriate list markup which means a list tag such as ol ul or dl and then list items marked up with li or dt and dd for definition lists. It s also possible to create a list using non-list tags such as div or a and convert them into lists using CSS. Within a CSS context an element is a list item if it has the display property value listitem. When that value is set the element is treated as an li tag by the browser no matter what the tag really is. The list-item value designates the element as a block element except that it also allows for a list marker. A list marker is a symbol before each list item that indicates it s a list.
