Suggestion: ORDER attribute for OL's

[Siemova]

I recently wanted to create an OL in reverse order. In scouring the web for a solution, I found no simple way to accomplish this, but came across a number of other people frustrated by the lack of this minor feature.

The easiest, most obvious solution would be to create an attribute for Ordered Lists -- let's call it order="" -- which would have two possible values: ftl (first to last) and ltf (last to first). Very much like the dir property for text, and, similarly, it would default/degrade to the normal first-to-last order.

The possible applications for this are numerous, of course: count-downs, top n lists, having "most recent" items at the top of a reverse-numbered list, etc. I'm sure anybody can think of times they'd want to do this. It would be particularly helpful for traditional print (newspapers, magazines, etc.) converting their content for internet use. Yes, you can accomplish such things via overloaded tables or CSS hacks, or avoid using an HTML list at all, but my proposal would make this use of lists much more convenient, more standardized, and less likely to break.

[zcorpan]

[...] but came across a number of other people frustrated by the lack of this minor feature.

Interesting, do you have any pointers to your findings?

[...] Yes, you can accomplish such things via overloaded tables or CSS hacks, or avoid using an HTML list at all, [...]

Do you know any pages that do this today?

[Siemova]

Interesting, do you have any pointers to your findings?

Here's one. This and this are more incidental, but here we have a thread dedicated to it -- a prime example of all the hacks people are reduced to for this simple effect. I also saw a number of other attempted threads or pleas on blogs which never even got answered because nobody knew how to solve the problem.

Do you know any pages that do this today?

In addition to the thread linked above, here's another example of a CSS hack, and another. Then here's a guy who had to write a JavaScript to re-order his lists. Also, I read another thread in which someone talked about using tables:

"Although `content1' may seem to contain capricious markup, I have found that this table setup best represents a radio group reverse ordered list across multiple browsers. I have been trying to do that without tables, but cross browser presentation is not consistent."

And, of course, there's the ubiquitous non-HTML list.

I could keep going, but that should be more than enough to give you the idea. Many people want to do this. There may be several potential solutions, but few people know what they are, none of them works in every case or even every browser, and all of them appear to overload markup not intended for that purpose.

[zcorpan]

Awesome. Thanks!

I've forwarded this to the list: http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatw ... 13578.html

[Siemova]

Very much appreciated. I know it's not a huge deal, but this could definitely prove handy on occasion. Good thing I'd been reading about HTML5 and the WHATWG recently, or I wouldn't have had any idea where to propose it!

[zcorpan]

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatw ... 14043.html