Ordered lists with non-number markers

Feature
1

Request: Add “type” attribute of <ol> to whitelist. Suggestion to do the same with “reversed” for <ol>, and “value” for <li>, for similar but less common reasons.

Purpose: These attributes are intended for use where the marker of ordered list items itself conveys meaning to the content of the list. Typically this is the case when list items are intended to be referred to via this marker. This is in contrast to CSS list-style-type which is intended where the choice of marker carries no significant purpose. (Though I did see it recommended for forum-wide localization, which is pretty great!)

Background: While attempting to quote an official reference document, I discovered an apparent limitation in list formatting which prevents doing so accurately. Quite often, list markers are purely stylistic. However, they are occasionally used to facilitate reference in list-heavy documents. For example, in official and legal documents, a list item (or sub-item) might be referred to by list marker: “Official Document Article I, section 1(a)(i)”

For Markdown, there’s no mention in the CommonMark specification, and indeed it specifies only digits, 0-9. But while most interpreters don’t permit letters for lists(including markdown-it), a couple do:

I’m uncertain of whether a standard method is available in BBCode, to the extent anything is standard in BBCode. I was unable to find anything more advanced than starting at an arbitrary digit. BBCode list tags don’t appear used by Discourse, anyway.

With HTML and HTML+style, neither produce the correct result:

3 Likes
2

Looking at GitHub, implementing this would likely be simply a matter of adding them to this list:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/app/assets/javascripts/pretty-text/white-lister.js#L181-L183

Though I do notice that introducing these will leave the HTML-to-markdown converter unaware of these attributes. But as demonstrated above, markdown-it currently can’t handle markdown syntax representing these anyway. For that, it may be desirable to go a step further and implement list types in CommonMark…

2 Likes
3

There are no plans for this.

4

The lack of this makes it very difficult to quote official documents, legal documents, software licenses, or anything else which use non-number markers for document references.

1 Like
5

Add a wrapper to those lists and some CSS

In posts use:

[wrap="letterlist"]
1. is the first
2. is the second.
3. is the third
[/wrap]

IN your theme add:

.cooked div[data-wrap="letterlist"]
  list-style: upper-alpha;
}
1 Like
6

That’s a good solution if the goal is arbitrary list decorations, but the HTML type attribute is specifically meant for semantically-meaningful situations where the difference between list markers are more than decorative. From <ol>: The Ordered List element - HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN

Unless the type of the list number matters (like legal or technical documents where items are referenced by their number/letter), use the CSS list-style-type property instead.

It’s a common enough need that although the HTML attribute was deprecated in HTML 4.01 (with justification of it being purely stylistic), it was subsequently re-introduced in HTML5 for the specific purpose of encoding reference lists as described by MDN.

1 Like
7

I tried using this solution and it works, correcting the CSS to the following (the first line was missing an ol {):

.cooked div[data-wrap="letterlist"] ol {
  list-style: upper-alpha;
}

However I can’t get it to show in the editor preview window, which is going to be a bit of an issue for most of my users. I’ve tried inspecting with the web browser, and it seems the custom CSS is not loaded or applied to the preview (I’m not a professional at this, so I might be wrong).

Any way you can think of to solve this problem, @Falco?

1 Like
8

I believe the html is supported now:

  1. This thing
  2. Another thing
  3. Something else 
<ol type="A">
<li> This thing
<li> Another thing
<li> Something else
</ol>

And the types A, a, I, and i.

Also <ol reversed> and <ol start=> as well:

  1. Bread
  2. Chips
  3. Watermelon 
<ol reversed start=36>
<li> Bread
<li> Chips
<li> Watermelon
</ol>
9

It seems that using HTML like that is disabling Markdown interpretation within the <li>, so that’s not really acceptable for me to propose to users.

1 Like
10

To make use of additional formatting within them I think you’d have to use the HTML version of that too as it doesn’t like mixing:

  1. Bread
  2. Chips
  3. Watermelon 
<ol reversed start=36>
<li> <b>Bread</b>
<li> <i>Chips</i>
<li> <s>Watermelon</s>
</ol>
11

I know. As I said, I don’t find that acceptable to propose to my users—it completely changes the markup just because you want a slightly different list.

12

Ah, I’m sorry that’s not an acceptable option for you.

Perhaps if you start a dev topic asking for help on tweaking your existing solution someone may be able to assist you. :+1:

1 Like