Lists with <br>s

[Stomme poes]

The #makelaar ul is hiding the last item behind the navigation. Maybe needs a bottom padding?

Thx for catching that, erik-- usually there's another wrapping element who has the bottom padding, but when I removed that from this page (and a few others) I forgot to check again in IE7 (who showed it worse, followed by Opera on XP... FF and SaffyChrome were ok, which was dumb of me to not continually check in all browsers after such a change).

A list of addresses would be best displayed as a table, in my opinion, but a single address should be a list.

I had considered an HTML table briefly, but didn't see enough "headers" to justify it. The page I was copying the design from had them in a long column like they are now, and I wasn't allowed to change it. Making a table look like a list was too much work, and I needed the skiplinks to work perfectly as well.

"Canada, Victoria B.C., Glentana Road" is wrong. "Glentana Rd., Victoria, B.C. Canada" is right. They teach you how to do it the right way in school, or they did when I went to school in the middle ages. Heaven knows what they teach these days.

We actually had a problem with that-- each country does it a little different and trying to auto-generate from the database had a few problems-- in my makelaar page above I actually corrected the single US address, as it had been done in European order and I worried anyone sending mail to the Florida address might give the posties there an excuse to lose the mail : )

It would be better still, in my opinion, if a proper html element existed for it, but you have to draw the line somewhere and you can't provide a semantic element for everything.

Amen. I've been abusing the <address> tag for postal addresses for some time now. Since <address> means "Author" I believe it should be changed to <author> and let us have <address> for, surprise, addresses. I also want a <smallprint> for Christmas, but for now I'm just using <small> when it makes sense.

As addresses may also be displayed on a singal line it is obvious, or so is seems to me, that a BR is in no way implied in the structure, and so should not be used.

While sometimes businesses will do this, it would be pretty hard to read my page of addresses if they were all one line. In the Netherlands it's pretty much only seen as a single line when it omits about half of it-- it will only consist of the street or PO box, then postcode and city, separated by a comma (which is not part of the address, but just a typography thing). The comma represents the line break that people understand to be normally used, but doesn't fit so well at the top of the back of an envelope or the footer of a web page.

It also seems to me that it is actually a list of elements with an implied order.

I think it has an implied order, but while a list of things can stand alone, I can't have just someone's postcode/city line floating around on its own. I can have a single menu item on its own as a standalone link, and I can have a recipe ingredient alone as well (Apple Pie is made of Apples) but I wouldn't know how to do that with Sumatraplein 8 (though you could convince me for the tel and fax numbers).

I do still want an HTML element for postal addresses. And a parent selector in CSS. And a pony.

[Ed Seedhouse]

If you are worried about the structure of an address beyond its being a series of lines separated by line breaks then you should be using the appropriate microformat to mark up the address so as to properly capture what is what within the address in the most accepted way.

I don't do "microformats" because I don't really understand them. I thought, though, that the question was the appropriate semantic markup of an address with html. I still don't see why an address is not a list. And if it is a list, shouldn't we mark it up as such?

[Ed Seedhouse]

I disagree. A menu presented as a bulleted list makes sense. The reason we remove the bullet points with CSS is not that they look wrong, but that we can convey the concept of a list in another way (e.g., with 'tabs' or 'buttons') that better fits into the page layout.

I just tried it at home. An address marked up as an ordered list looks like an address to me in the default style for my current browser. The little numbers look a bit odd, but it's still quite obviously an address, and not anything else.

But for semantic markup the question should not, surely, be "what is the default markup style", but "what is the meaning and how may we best mark up that meaning? The idea is, after all, to separate markup and presentation.

If we mark it up as separate lines delimited by BR we are implying that each element of an address must appear on a new line. But it needen't. It can be, for example, space and comma delimited on a single line and still quite obviously be an address.

Furthermore I demand you accept my proposition that 1 million is exactly the number of angels who can dance on the end of a pin,

[AutisticCuckoo]

But for semantic markup the question should not, surely, be "what is the default markup style", but "what is the meaning and how may we best mark up that meaning?

Absolutely. I was merely suggesting that the default styling can give a hint as to how the element type is meant to be used, semantically.

If we mark it up as separate lines delimited by BR we are implying that each element of an address must appear on a new line. But it needen't. It can be, for example, space and comma delimited on a single line and still quite obviously be an address.

It could, but there's a very strong convention to write postal addresses with a particular format using multiple lines. I don't ever think I've seen the comma-separated single-line version on an envelope delivered in my post box. I'd consider that an alternative format.

Furthermore I demand you accept my proposition that 1 million is exactly the number of angels who can dance on the end of a pin,

No way! The correct answer is 16, although there are many other suggestions.

[felgall]

I don't know whether this applies in all countries but in Australia the Post Office has rules as to what must appear on what LINE within an address in order for them to deliver it. The place name (or country if it is going overseas) must start the last line of the address and the line break in front of the place name is NOT optional.

[Stomme poes]

They prolly have that rule to make it easier on their ORC's.

I have seen the one-line addresses, but they're never complete. Again, only on website footers and the backs of envelopes, and only in the Netherlands. Yeah, new content has to be added then, the comma, but I think nowadays most people knows what it means.

[Ed Seedhouse]

I don't know whether this applies in all countries but in Australia the Post Office has rules as to what must appear on what LINE within an address in order for them to deliver it. The place name (or country if it is going overseas) must start the last line of the address and the line break in front of the place name is NOT optional.

This is only a standard for putting addresses on envelopes in such a way that the envelope is guaranteed to be delivered. As such it surely has little relevance to html semantics. An address always contains address elements, it is not always on multiple lines.

Of course if you want your envelope and it's contents delivered you would be well to follow the Post Office's standard for your envelopes.

[nighthawks]

Really a very good discussion, enough to keep learning.