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<del> and <ins> in lists

22 Mar 08 - 12:16

While working on some examples to demonstrate <ins> and <del> with a document history viewer I came across an unexpected problem. If you want to remove or insert a whole list item, you can’t wrap it in <del> or <ins> as <ul> and <ol> only allows <li> children.

Putting <del> inside the <li> makes the browsers render the list item as it was empty but with the bullet, leaving an undesired result if you have set del { display: hidden; }.

This appears to be a case where the specifications haven’t taken into account every option. If you remove a list item at some point and would like to mark that up in your HTML document then you want to mark up the entire list item, including the <li> tag, not just it content.

Fortunately, it looks like all browsers will render <del><li>Lorem Ipsum</li></del> as I want, removing the entire list item including the bullet. This is invalid markup according to the specifications, but I think that this is a good example of where you can ignore that.

I posted a comment about this in the public W3C HTML news group. Hoping that it’d be added to the HTML5 specifications. So far there’s no response.

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