No Mod Required

I’m constantly trying to come up with little markup patterns that make semantic sense and make it easier for me to create requested layouts without having to resort to a bunch of extra classes and IDs.

One common design element that I’ve been bothered by recently* but haven’t sat down and figured out looks like this:

Today I took a step back** and came up with this to represent it:

<dl>
<dt>Sessions focus on:</dt>
<dd>
<ul>
<li>Configuring, tuning and understanding hardware servers and software applications</li>
<li>Client side issues related to Mac OS X computing and management</li>
<li>Integration with PSx, UNIX, Telephony and other environments </li>
<li>Managing Macs in an enterprise environment</li>
<li>A Jump start for admin newbies</li>
<li>Best Practices for 3rd Party Tools IntegrationM</li>
</ul>
</dd>
</dl>

Which feels just about right to me- it captures the relationship between the lead-in (the lead in being the term defined) and the list (the list being the definition of the lead-in), and would allow me to style the whole thing with no additional markup.

I’ll just go ahead and file that one away.

*I’ve seen it on four or five different sites I’ve built in the past year and not so often before that. So up until recently it was never enough of a recurring pattern for me to even worry about.

**amazingly, since this markup will end up on a Drupal site. It’s a wonder I even bothered since Drupal is pretty much on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from my minimalist coding style.