I will be writing a simple forum of my own soon and I am trying to come up with the best way to style the layout and what html tags to use.
What html tags would be best for this? A forum listing could be made with <li> tags. But it could also be treated as tabular data so perhaps using <table> would be best?
What about the page with posts? Can it be considered tabular data? VBulletin uses tables everywhere, phpbb3 uses <dt> and <dd>, a simple forum at http://forums.dropbox.com/ uses <li> (and tables for forum listing).
What are your opinions on this? I know tableless design is the way to go but still I don’t want to go over the board if <table> is the most sensible semantic element to use.
No <dt> and <dd> are not really appropriate for a standard forum post reply. People too oft get the crazy notion because something has a weak association it must be a ‘definition’.
It is surprising the same ‘deranged people’ don’t abandon the use of H1 and P, i.e. <h1>[typical h1 text]</h1><p>I am a paragraph. Lorem… </p> and rewrite it as; <dl><dt>[typical h1 text]</dt><dd>I am a paragraph. Lorem… </dd></dl> oh dear.
As far as topic listings are concerned I am inclined to use tables. But still not sure what would be the best for topic posts. <dt> and <dd> indeed seem a bit out of place. <li> could be the way to go. <div> is the least semantic tag and most neutral - could also be a good alternative considering there is no semantic tag that fits this purpose well.
I wouldn’t use tables, as forum posts are not tabular data. LIs/OLs seems the way to go to me. You see them used nicely in many WordPress comments etc. Some newer forums are stepping up to the plate and abandoning tables. Check out a page like the one below (provided by Tender):
