My cohort Steven expressed his frustration with this a long time ago, but I thought it was worth reiterating. Why the heck does anyone turn off the automatic indenting on bullet lists? By default, a bullet list (also called an unordered list) on a website has nicely indented text like this:
- This is the first list item and when
it wraps onto two lines, it indents nicely. - This is the second list item and when
it wraps onto two lines, it indents nicely too.
On the other hand, some designers, such as Jeffrey Zeldman, sometimes intentionally disable this using some simple styling and their lists look like:
- This is the first list item and when
it wraps onto two lines, it doesn't indent. - This is the second list item and when
it wraps onto two lines, it doesn't indent either.
Now, I can maybe understand doing this if you're extremely limited by space and need to fit in as much content as possible, but I can't envision another purpose. As far as I can see, indented bullet lists are easier to scan visually, look more orderly, and are easier to make.
Comments
Alan - December 2, 2003 3:52 pm
The indented bullet also confirms the subsidary nature of each bullet to the parent text which should justify to the left just in line with the bullet, not in line with the text under that bullet. This is how you can get some complex listing and sub-listing in legislation without indenting so far that a sub-clause (four lists down under the parent clause, its parent sub-section and the parent section) does not end up with an inch wide column rammed up against the right side of the page.
Alan - December 2, 2003 3:54 pm
Sorry - I got a bit backwards - ignore " not in line with the text under that bullet". Blame France.
Daniel Burka - December 2, 2003 4:21 pm
Alan, let me get this straight: Legal lists can sometimes be formatted like this?<br />
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Alan - December 3, 2003 12:11 pm
No, it <i>should</i> be [and I had the working impression that it was] indented and justified within the subheading. The indent for a sub-class's letter/number would be to the point of its parent text not further to the right.
Having said that, I have found Ontario uses the bad way by wrapping the test under the number/letter identifying the subsection: see this example. Poop, <ahref=http://www.gov.pe.ca/law/statutes/pdf/a-24.pdf">PEI does it too</a>! ...and NS does too.
Then I look at <i>Construction of Statutes</i>, 4th ed. and my world is upside down as they show section numbers indented by a half inch or so then the text fully wrapped back to the left margin. This is not followed in the sub-classes of the section. They only wrap under the number/letter. Law, it turns out, is ugly after all.
Pete - December 3, 2003 2:23 pm
It's <i>probably</i> not worth losing sleep over.