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A comment on On The <dl>.

Re:On The <dl> by theodpHN on Saturday May 23, 2026 @03:27PM (#48250557)
List history (listory?) lesson, kids: As the link below to a 1985 IBM mainframe DCF/GML manual shows, DL-DT-DD have been a thing since before the web. In addition to Definition lists (DL), the 40+ year-old documentation describes Glossary lists (GL), Ordered lists (OL), Unordered lists (UL), and Simple lists (SL).

ibm :: 370 :: DCF :: SH35-0050-2 Document Composition Facility Generalized Markup Language Implementation Guide Rel 3 Mar85

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibm370DCFSpositionFaci...

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Re:On The <dl> by JohnKemeny on Saturday May 23, 2026 @04:22PM (#48251108)
Isn't it description list?
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Re:On The <dl> by hoppyhoppy2 on Sunday May 24, 2026 @07:40AM (#48256467)
FWIW, the Wikipedia page on "HTML elements" says:

>A description list (a.k.a. association list or definition list)[...]

The "Definition list" Wikipedia article is a redirect to that paragraph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_element#dl

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Re:On The <dl> by skgough on Saturday May 23, 2026 @06:12PM (#48252086)
I believe IBM Generalized Markup Language evolved into SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) which was used heavily at CERN when Tim Berners-Lee was working on HTML, which is heavily derived from it. I find this interesting about HTML: some form of the markup language had been floating around for decades until Berners-Lee added hyperlinks to it.
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Re:On The <dl> by epc on Saturday May 23, 2026 @07:48PM (#48252783)
GML dates to 1969, SGML from the 1970s. Internally we used something called BookMaster which kind of? looks like a precursor to HTML (you had :p. instead of <p>, :li. instead of <li>). There was an effort circa 1990-1991 (as TBL was developing HTML and HTTP) called HyTime which was an SGML application focused on hypermedia. HTML killed that fairly quickly.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Goldfarb who shepherded GML/SGML and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_La...

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