Plain Lists

7.3 - Plain Lists

Plain lists without bullets are represented by the UL element together with the PLAIN attribute, e.g. <UL PLAIN>. The WRAP attribute is used for multi-column lists and should be WRAP=HORIZ for horizontally wrapping of list items or WRAP=VERT for vertical wrapping of list items, e.g.

<UL PLAIN>
	<LI>icons1/
	<LI>icons2/
	<LI>icons3/
	<LI>src/
	<LI>xpm-3-paper.ps
	<LI>xpm-3.2-to-3.2a.patch
</UL>

without the WRAP attribute, this is rendered as:

icons1/
icons2/
icons3/
src/
xpm-3-paper.ps
xpm-3.2-to-3.2a.patch

with <UL PLAIN WRAP=VERT> this would appear like:

icons1/ icons3/ xpm-3-paper.ps
icons2/ src/ xpm-3.2-to-3.2a.patch

with WRAP=HORIZ it would appear like:

icons1/ icons2/ icons3/
src/ xpm-3-paper.ps xpm-3.2-to-3.2a.patch

Everyday familiarity with printed lists leads us to expect lists to be organized into columns which are read top to bottom; horizontally wrapped lists are seldom seen. Browsers are free to choose the number of columns to match the current window size and item widths. If there are N items and M columns then the longest column will have (N+M-1)/M rows. This requires a prepass through the list to count the items (and optionally their maximum width). However, this information can be cached to avoid speed penalties when resizing the window or refreshing the screen. You can use the SRC attribute for the LI element to specify an icon for each item in the list, e.g. to show the type of each document in a directory listing.

For convenience, the <MENU> and <DIR> elements can be used in place of <UL PLAIN> and <UL PLAIN WRAP=VERT> respectively.

HTML+ Discussion Document - November 8, 1993

[Top] [Up] [Next] [Previous]