This is an ex-HTML

[j4]

Okay, I think I'm going mad. I put the following into our CMS:

<ul>
<li> Item 1
<ul>
<li> SubItem 1</li>
<li> SubItem 2</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li> Item 2</li>
</ul>

and it (silently, without any notification) 'corrected' it to the following:

<ul>
<li>Item 1
<ul></ul></li>
<li>SubItem 1</li>
<li>SubItem 2</li>
<li>Item 2</li></ul>

I pointed this out to the people who are setting up the new site for us, and they raised it as a support call with the CMS people, and got the following response:

"Could you please use the following schema:

<ul>
<li>Item 1</li>
<ul>
<li>SubItem 1</li>
<li>SubItem 2</li>
</ul>
<li>Item 2</li>
</ul>

Such syntax is formatted correctly."

If such syntax is formatted correctly, why doesn't it validate? I'm not even trying to be a validation Nazi about this (it's not as if anything that comes out of this CMS is ever going to validate anyway), it's more that I don't really want to have to 'correct' all our existing HTML to prevent it being 'corrected' by the CMS.

Comments

[stephdairy.livejournal.com]

I don't see why their option shouldn't validate. Both it and your original version are valid HTML 4 (though only theirs is also valid XHTML).

Their CMS's behaviour is reminiscent of that of LJ's HTML "fixer" which spews out a load of close tags for any elements you may have forgotten to close at any point in the rest of the document...

I'd say this "miscorrection" is a bug in the CMS, unless the CMS is expecting to deal with XHTML.

(S)

[j4.livejournal.com]

Okay, now I'm even more confused. Is this article (http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_html.asp)* just fibbing when it says that a nested list like my original is 'correct' for XHTML? (NB my example does close the <li> for Item 1, after the <ul> which it contains.)

* I'm not saying that it's an authoritative source, but.

[fanf]

I agree with you and the article you link to. The HTML 4.01 DTD says that the only elements allowed within an <ol> or <ul> are <li>, so nested lists have to go within list items.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/lists.html#h-10.2

[stephdairy.livejournal.com]

No, I just misread your example. Perhaps I should just shut up until I've drunk my coffee.

The HTML 4.01 Strict DTD allows LI to contain almost anything, including UL. (Curiously I can't see anything that allows a UL to contain another UL or OL, but see my comment about coffee...)

(S)