Lists

Every once in a while a list can be very handy. You can use them to show ingredients in a recipe or as a table of contents for your document. HTML markup has two different kinds of lists – the ordered and the unordered lists.

The unordered list starts with the opening tag <ul> (abbreviation of unordered list) and every item on list is surrounded by the <li> tag (li stands for list item)

<ul>
	<li>List item no. 1</li>
	<li>List item no. 2</li>
	<li>List item no. 3</li>
</ul>

This HTML markup would result in an unordered list that looks like this:

• List item no. 1
• List item no. 2
• List item no. 3

Generally the unordered list has black circles as bullet points – you can actually change how the bullet points should look, using CSS.

The ordered list looks like this:

1. First list-item
2. Second list-item
3. Third list-item

And instead of the <ul> tag, you use the <ol> (abbreviation for ordered list)

<ol>
	<li>List item no. 1</li>
	<li>List item no. 2</li>
	<li>List item no. 3</li>
</ol>

Except for the obvious reason to use the list (when you actually want a list) a lot of webdesigners use the list to create their menus and navigations – as the navigation very often is a set of related links. Using the list to markup your navigation also means, that if the CSS styling fails the links will still be semantically related.

What you have learned

• There are two different kinds of lists – ordered lists and unordered lists
• The tag for en ordered list is <ol>
• The tag for the unordered list is <ul>
• Every item on the list is marked up with the <li> element
• The list element is an obvious choice when create your navigation