> <dl aria-label="Ability Scores">

This is incorrect:

1. <dl> has no corresponding (viz. implicit) role, but can be given the role group, list, none or presentation <https://w3c.github.io/html-aria/#el-dl>.

2. You’re only allowed to define aria-label on elements that have a compatible role, implicit or explicit <https://w3c.github.io/html-aria/#docconformance-naming>.

3. aria-label is allowed on all but a handful of roles <https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.2/#aria-label>, which in this case knocks out presentation and none, leaving group and list.

4. group doesn’t feel right, list feels acceptable.

In summary: either ditch the aria-label, or add role="list" (meaning also role="listitem" on children).

—⁂—

One thing the article misses is that you can have multiple <dt> in a row too, not just <dd>. The spec has a good example: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-content.html...

They’re not name–value pairs, they’re name–value groups.

• redmatter

  today at 3:55 PM

  Wow I have never noticed that, thanks for the heads up! Out of curiosity, would you put `role="listitem"` on `<div>` elements that wrap the `<dt>` && `<dd>` elements? It looks like `role="listitem"` is allowed on the `<dt>` element, but that doesn't feel like it would be accurate in the case where multiple `<dt>` elements are grouped together, and I'm not sure if that would mess with how the element is interpreted natively as as term.

  • chrismorgan

    today at 4:28 PM

    I know the fundamentals of this sort of thing, but I haven’t done much practical with it, so I don’t feel that I can comment on this point.

• brewmarche

  today at 5:38 PM

  Your comment put me on a side quest to research the differences between i.e., e.g., viz. and sc. and I have to admit that I’m still not 100% sure

  • chrismorgan

    today at 6:41 PM

    Don’t think I’ve ever heard of scilicet. <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=viz.,sc.&year_...> definitely suggests viz. to have been massively more popular than sc.

  • HappMacDonald

    today at 6:39 PM

    Concordantly, vis a vis, ergo..

• huflungdung

  today at 4:22 PM

  [dead]

This is going to be unpopular here, but life became easier when I quit trying to write semantic HTML. It’s just poorly designed, I’m sorry. Every time I’ve reached for a <dl> I’ve eventually regretted it because I wanted multiple levels of wrappers, or a divider between sections, or an icon, or a heading spanning multiple key-value pairs, etc. They make this stuff with some flexibility but nowhere near enough to actually cover the generalized concept it purports to. I still use the corresponding elements when there are observable benefits, of course, like <button>, <h1>, etc, but when all it’s going to do is not quite fit the data model and force me to override everything, it’s just not a practical choice.

It shouldn’t be so controversial to say that if 99% of usage routes around your API, it’s probably the API’s fault.

• halapro

  today at 4:35 PM

  Sounds like it's CSS' fault then. I think that just like they introduced `display:contents` to remove wrappers, they should also introduce a way to group elements as if they had a common ancestor.

      :wrap(dt, dt+dd) {border: solid 1px}

  • eurleif

    today at 5:40 PM

    Proposal from 2016 (closed): https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/588

  • WorldMaker

    today at 6:16 PM

    With CSS Grid math you can fake it, at least. If your DL is `display: grid;` and if you have a few extra DIVs lying around at the bottom of the DL to be borders around combined cells you just have to math which rows/columns you want to draw a border around and make the div fit that combined shape.

  • cubefox

    today at 5:50 PM

    Good idea. Together with ::after / ::before and content: (which can insert text into the website) it might then be possible to create a website without any HTML, only CSS.

• miki123211

  today at 5:28 PM

  As a person who daily drives a screen reader, I so agree with this.

  We'd all be better off if the W3 dispensed with all that ideological semantic purity BS and started doing more realpolitik. Think not about whether your API is semantically pure, but about what developers want to do, what hacks they'll use to achieve their goals despite your objections, and how to enable doing those things in a way that is maximally beneficial to everyone involved.

  ARIA live regions are the perfect example. What developers actually want is `document.speakText`. What developers actually have is a weird API that announces text on the page as it changes. They have to bridge from one to the other, which is difficult and hacky, even when implemented well. But hey, at least that live region approach is semantically pure HTML...

  • SebastianKra

    today at 6:24 PM

    I don't want that. I don't want to care about screen readers (unfortunately I have to). I want a system where I can pick well-defined rules and then css can style it, screen readers will understand it, automations can parse it, keyboard navigation is free.

    Obviously thats not what we got, but I feel like the set of established UI patterns is manageable enough that it could be built.

    A great example is the new <select> styling that developers styled in all kinds of creative ways. Now give me that for comboboxes, trees, data-grids etc...

    • extra88

      today at 6:40 PM

      There are already well-defined rules, you just don't like some of the rules, e.g. you can't (today) style <select> options. Keyboard navigation is free as long as you follow the rules about which elements are focusable.

      You shouldn't have to care about screen readers the same as you shouldn't have to care which browser someone uses but you always have to care about people; people who can't see or hear what you create, people who can operate a keyboard (or keyboard-equivalent) but not a mouse or touchscreen, people who can use a touchscreen but not a physical keyboard, etc.

  • extra88

    today at 6:31 PM

    Good news! `.ariaNotify()` is basically a real implementation of your hypothetical document.speakText.

    https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/ari...

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...

The world's first website makes heavy use of <dl>s.

https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

https://info.cern.ch/ (A landing page of sorts to give context and orientation about the actual first website.)

> Prior to HTML5, this was called a definition list. This is because the <dl> was originally only intended to represent glossaries of terms and their definitions.

TIL I’ve been naming it wrong for a decade.

• sunshowers

  today at 6:00 PM

  Bleh. <b> is apparently now bring attention to. As if.

  • today at 6:35 PM

  • extra88

    today at 6:51 PM

    Eh, it's fine, elements should be defined for what they mean, not what they look like. The explanation and distinctions made between <b> and other elements (<i>, <em>, <strong>) make sense.

    The suggested (not obligatory) user agent styling for <b> is `font-weight: bolder` an agent or authors could use lots of different things to bring attention to what the element contains and treat it differently from <strong>.

    https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/text-level-semantics....

    https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/rendering.html#phrasi...

    • sunshowers

      today at 7:00 PM

      I write most of my content in markdown or asciidoc and I don't pay attention to whether it's b or strong :)

      • extra88

        today at 7:34 PM

        In practice today, that's fine. Typically authors have a hard time differentiating what "emphasis," "importance," and "bring attention to" mean to them. Therefore, nothing conveys a distinction by default.

        • sunshowers

          today at 7:44 PM

          So then what's the point of making this distinction? I would like to see surveys of how many people actually author content in forms that differentiate between b and strong.

• Ancapistani

  today at 4:10 PM

  You’re not alone. This is the second time this week I’ve seen that, and thought it was a mistake the first time.

• xp84

  today at 3:19 PM

  I don’t want to check what year html5 was standardized because I think it may be north of a decade ;)

  • zbentley

    today at 3:40 PM

    > I think it may be north of a decade

    Nearly two!

    • stouset

      today at 4:03 PM

      I was better off not knowing that this morning. Might be worth prefixing that tidbit of info with “trigger warning: the unrelenting passage of time”.

      • HappMacDonald

        today at 6:43 PM

        There exist toddlers who were raised on Teletubbies that are now members of Congress

        • stouset

          today at 6:57 PM

          I’m going to have to politely request that you stop this immediately.

• jasonlotito

  today at 3:35 PM

  TIL The name was changed from a definition list.

  • Tepix

    today at 4:10 PM

    Same here. I like definition list better ;-)

Here's a useful note on how well screen readers support DL: https://adrianroselli.com/2025/01/updated-brief-note-on-desc...

I've been following roadmap.sh, and while it's not a comprehensive learning resource, it does help close obvious knowledge gaps. As it happens I was just reading about this.

https://roadmap.sh/html (see "Definition lists")

The final example of the DnD statt sheet makes me think whether it's legal to nest <dl>s?

I.e. can we do

    <dl>
      <dt>Actions</dt>
      <dd><dl>...</dl></dd>
    </dl>

• perilunar

  today at 2:47 PM

  Yes. Any flow content is permitted inside a <dd>. See:

  https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#the-dd-element

  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

  • myfonj

    today at 3:32 PM

    Plus, when curious about formal syntactic correctness, there is the validator.w3.org [1].

    [1] https://validator.w3.org/nu/?showsource=yes&showoutline=yes&...

  • moron4hire

    today at 3:13 PM

    I do it to render nested JSON objects, for example.

I love DL. I think tables, at least in the past, were misused as DLs even more in the past and the inconvenience of the table markup is even worse than a bunch of divs.

• enriquto

  today at 2:53 PM

  It's not that inconvenient if you omit unnecessary closing tags:

      <tr>
      <td> first
      <td> second
      <tr>
      <td> what
      <td> ever
  

  I find it simpler and cleaner than any of the markdown table markups

  • myfonj

    today at 3:26 PM

    Fair point, though /DT and /DD are also optional just like /TH, /TD and /TR are. So in effect, def…scription list could structurally save you one TR for each entry and two "BLE"s:

        <table><tr><th>Term 1<td>Definition 1
               <tr><th>Term 2<td>Definition 2
        </table>
        <dl><dt>Term 1<dd>Definition 1
            <dt>Term 2<dd>Definition 2
        </dl>

  • debesyla

    today at 2:57 PM

    Isn't markdown table just a bunch of | ?

    • zufallsheld

      today at 2:59 PM

      That's the problem.

      • froh

        today at 3:14 PM

        most specifically the problem is that markdown tables don't allow breaking the table row in multiple lines

        but then you can always use HTML tables in markdown and Pandoc transforms it just fine

        • hnlmorg

          today at 3:37 PM

          <br> has worked fine whenever I’ve needed line breaking in markdown tables

          • quietbritishjim

            today at 4:45 PM

            I think they mean breaking the line in the markup, not the output

          • xigoi

            today at 4:29 PM

            They mean in the Markdown code, not in the output.

        • jazzypants

          today at 3:29 PM

          Every markdown implementation is supposed to allow inline HTML.

• bdcravens

  today at 2:40 PM

  You're right, but forcing tables to cosplay as DLs was far from the worst way that tables were abused.

  • sodapopcan

    today at 2:54 PM

    At least <td>s could easily centre things vertically ;)

• egeozcan

  today at 3:06 PM

  I always thought the DL as a single row of a table.

I'm curious if the spec actually says you can only wrap it with a div because I like to do semantic html and name my elements specific to my domain.

• notnullorvoid

  today at 4:16 PM

  As others have noted only the div is allowed. This isn't a unique situation either, the HTML spec despite being lenient in syntax is quite restrictive in behavior. It's unfortunate that XHTML (and XML parsing) didn't become the default as it's the opposite, more restrictive syntax, but lenient behavior.

  For example in XHTML you can use custom elements as table rows or cells (provided you give them the correct role and CSS display property). This is because XHTML does not modify the tree during parsing, unlike HTML which will hoist out custom element children of the table to the table's parent.

• philo23

  today at 1:54 PM

  Yep, I was a little surprised about that too, seem like it is valid though https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

• wonger_

  today at 1:57 PM

  Seems like div is the only recommended wrapper element:

  https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-content.html...

  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

  EDIT everyone replied at once lol. I'm surprised too about div.

  Also, screen reader support: https://a11ysupport.io/tech/html/dl_element

• today at 1:55 PM

• Tomte

  today at 1:55 PM

  Yes: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-content.html...

• moron4hire

  today at 3:14 PM

  Custom-named elements are divs.

  • phyzix5761

    today at 3:50 PM

    They're not as you can see here[1] and here[2]. They both inherit from the HTMLElement interface but div is considered an HTMLDivElement which makes it distinct from a custom element.

    <my-element> != <div>

    [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_compone...

    [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLDivElem...

    • today at 4:13 PM

    • moron4hire

      today at 7:24 PM

      HTMLDivElement has no properties or methods not inherited from HTMLElement. If you inspect the user-agent styling of div versus any non-standard named element, you'll see that they have the same styling path, specifically unlike with span. In other words, non-standard elements and divs are all block elements with the default HTMLElement attributes and methods.

      The use of HTMLElement and HTMLUnknownElement for the non-standard elements is to support future additions to the standard elements and enable subclassing down-tree instead of across-tree, which is noted in the spec.

  • jazzypants

    today at 3:37 PM

    Exactly! It cracks me up when people name-check "semantic elements" when it doesn't actually mean anything in that context. Accessibility software doesn't understand the semantics of your custom elements, so there is no benefit in that situation whatsoever. Maybe it's easier for you to read and edit in the future, but that's it.

    Somehow, people got convinced that <div> elements are evil and should never be used no matter what. Yes, you should use a more semantic element when it makes sense, but try to remember what that phrase actually means.

    • phyzix5761

      today at 3:41 PM

      I use it for readability and to express intention and meaning to the reader of my program. In the age of AI, perhaps, we've lost the need for that. But it was much appreciated in times before by those who came upon my code.

      • jazzypants

        today at 4:01 PM

        That's great! There's nothing wrong with that.

        However, "semantic elements" became popular shortly after the push for the "semantic web" which was entirely based around making the web easier to process for machines. Many of the original sources talk about how it's easier to digest for humans too, but that's just a happy byproduct.

        https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html

        https://www.lassila.org/publications/2001/SciAm.pdf

        https://informationr.net/ir/7-4/paper134.html

        https://jonchristopher.us/blog/a-semantic-breakdown-of-resta...

        https://shapeshed.com/the-importance-of-semantic-markup/

        https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/

        https://microformats.org/wiki/posh

  • today at 3:55 PM

I've used this a good amount of times, when I coded in front end projects. The first time gave me that satisfying feeling of using the right tool for the job, like completing a puzzle of HTML semantics. I remember JAWS not announcing it correctly in 2018, not sure if it's better now.

• wizzwizz4

  today at 2:02 PM

  When I checked in 2024 or 2025, Windows Narrator announced it differently in Chrome, Firefox, Edge (Chromium mode) and Edge (IE mode), and none of them worked how I would expect them to. Adrian Roselli's verdict (https://adrianroselli.com/2025/01/updated-brief-note-on-desc...):

  > Description list support continues to be generally good (with VoiceOver still the outlier), even if you may not like how it is supported.

  You shouldn't try to fix this kind of thing by mangling the HTML, since (1) users tend to be used to their screen reader's quirks, and (2) in situations like these, making it juuuust right in one screen reader is likely to make it incomprehensible in another. But it is important to be aware of these quirks, so you don't accidentally design an interface that relies on less-quirky behaviour.

> Admittedly, however, support for the <dl> element is not yet universal.

Wait what? <DL> has been in HTML since.. the first draft in 1993!

I like DL's but they can be challenging to style. This article is using a lot of fixed pixel widths which would break on really small screens or larger data.

• extra88

  today at 7:06 PM

  Well, it took about a decade for web standards to become a real thing and a lot longer for Web Platform Tests to come to be. Still, while there are lots of tests for DOM construction and visual rendering, testing construction of the accessibility tree is lacking (also keyboard interaction testing).

  And that's just for browsers, there's no shared spec for the operating system accessibility APIs the browsers' accessibility tree has to be translated into or how screen readers (and other assistive technologies) will use the OS's APIs.

• 3eb7988a1663

  today at 3:47 PM

  Granted, I do not know what I am doing with CSS, but the Character Sheet example seems standard flexible elements?

  Some of the extracted CSS chunks

    #statblock{
      box-shadow:0 20px 25px -5px rgba(0,0,0,.1),0 10px 10px -5px rgba(0,0,0,.04);
      font-family:Lato,'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif;
      font-size:85%;
      min-width:50ch;
      max-width:70ch;
      margin-inline:auto;
      background-color:#fffaf0;
      padding-inline:2rem;
      padding-block:1rem
    }
    dl.statblock-bio{
      color:maroon;
      line-height:1.5;
      border-top:5px solid maroon;
      border-bottom:5px solid maroon;
      margin-block:0.75em;
      padding-block:0.75em
    }
    dl.ability-scores{
      min-width:40ch;
      display:flex;
      justify-content:space-around;
      color:maroon
    }
    dl.ability-scores>div{
      text-align:center;
      line-height:1.5
    }
    dl.ability-scores dt{
      font-weight:700
    }

• WorldMaker

  today at 6:20 PM

  I've found CSS Grid is extremely useful for styling DLs.

• today at 3:30 PM

I was a bit surprised to see nested <div>s given as some sort of precursor pattern, when <dl> was part of HTML before 2.0 back in the days of table layout.

• xigoi

  today at 4:39 PM

  It’s probably aimed at React developers, many of which are probably not even aware that elements other than <div> exist.

  • today at 6:37 PM

Hoped to see CSS for the alternative, where <div> is not nested inside the <dl>. Too used to thinking of div as "layout containers."

• WorldMaker

  today at 6:30 PM

  CSS Grid is a very good friend when trying to style DL without extra DIV wrappers. An example:

      dl {
          display: grid;
          grid-template-columns: 1fr 3fr;
          grid-template-rows: auto;
      }
  
      dt {
          grid-column-start: 1;
      }
  
      dd {
          grid-column-start: 2;
      }
  

  That very simply puts terms side-by-side data in a nice obvious way. (Even with multiple DDs per DT.) A bit like the Wikipedia screenshot in the article but that's more balanced `grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr;`. (But that's the flexibility of CSS Grid, right? Real easy to tweak this further for your needs/interests/design.)

The <dl> tag seems to cover a subset of a broad semantic space, but doesn’t easily extend beyond adding another <dd>.

I dunno, I guess I’m a caveman. If it looks right and works (including accessibility) then I figure I’m pursuing something that doesn’t matter a lot.

• callc

  today at 4:28 PM

  Shameless plug: you might be interested in https://calvinlc.com/p/2026/02/11/everything-is-a-div.html

  I need to learn more about web accessibility, but if you completely ignore it (and other sane practices) HTML looks really simple.

  I think the design of HTML is just too much. There’s so many tags that don’t do much. It’s like w3c decided that any common thing people use in websites needs a tag. The end result is more and more tags…

  Can anyone convince me otherwise? It screams design red-flags to me.

  PS: I love the web and think it’s the best platform and future platform we have at the moment. It’s just quirky and loves not breaking old websites!

  • extra88

    today at 7:28 PM

    lol, you should actually read the HTML spec, there are good explanations of all the elements. The whole point of defining semantics is that elements have meaning independent of their default appearance (or any appearance).

    > I need to learn more about web accessibility, but if you completely ignore it (and other sane practices) HTML looks really simple.

    Everything looks really simple when you ignore vast amounts of the subject and nuance.

    Your rules don't mention keyboard or focus behavior, the only mention of either is the association between <label> and its <input>. <output> does have functionality, it's an HTML-native ARIA live region (that can be associated with a <label>).

    https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/

  • shermantanktop

    today at 5:05 PM

    Oh that’s great. It’s an opinionated view that focused strictly on the behavior of the tags wrt layout and appearance.

    I’ve noticed that discussions of semantic meaning of tags often contain the word “feel.” Nothing wrong with that, taste matters, but it does point to the non-functional goals that are being pursued when people disagree.

    <ol> vs <ul> - they are both ordered, because markup is ordered. One gets decorated differently than the other by default. Is the difference semantic or typographical?

    • bulatb

      today at 5:59 PM

      A <ul> is a list of things whose order makes no difference to its meaning. Rearranging a <ul> would change the presentation, not the information. Rearranging an <ol> would change both.

        <ul> Players
          <li> Alice
          <li> Bob
          <li> Carol
        </ul>
      
        <ol> Leaderboard
          <li> Bob
          <li> Alice
          <li> Carol
        </ol>

      • shermantanktop

        today at 7:42 PM

        Exactly. “Unordered” implies “reordering doesn’t change meaning.” And yet that’s already implicit in the bullets (vs numbers).

        So is it a decoration hint? Or is it actually semantic? And what system is interpreting the semantics rather than the visual presentation?

The GOV.UK Design System summary list component is a description list https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/summary-list...

And... it also uses the wrapper div for styling

• 9dev

  today at 2:56 PM

  The wrapper div is making me a bit sad. These days, using grid layout, you don’t actually need it in most cases

  • petepete

    today at 4:55 PM

    The problem with 'in most cases' when it comes to a design system that's used in hundreds of different ways across departments and services, is that some week break.

    I don't really like the div either (I use the design system all day, and maintain a set of components), but it makes documentation much easier.

  • Theodores

    today at 4:33 PM

    Absolutely!

    I put dl lists in a grid with no divs needed. As MDN says, div is the last resort, invariably there is something better, and nowadays that is grid styling.

    New to me is multiple dd's.

    For legacy layouts littered with divs and classes, display: contents helps get rid of the div wrappers, promoting whatever is wrapped.

    Even with disclosure elements there are ways to avoid div wrappers using the pseudo element for everything enclosed by the details element apart from the summary element.

I loved the character sheet example! Fun!

We've always used this in our ebooks for abbreviation and glossary lists. The problem I've always had is that you need to use a bit of css to make two lined-up columns. I've done it with floats. Now, some ebook readers will support grid and flex-box, which give better results, but the Kindle still does not. Kindle is sort of the IE6 of the ebook world.

What about multiple '&lt;dt&gt;' for one or more '&lt;dd&gt;'?

This seems a clear enough win for things that would fit into a simple python dictionary.

Why is it preferred over <table> for laying out columns via a the character attributes at the bottom of TFA?

it's on archive html5 .flac 16-bit 44.1kHz no <dl> flag.

blog looks beautiful. I really wish I had this kind of talent for frontend.

It always bugs me that the naming of the element does not seem to really fit examples like „Author: Tolkien“. It‘s not that _Tolkien“_ „defines“ the „term“ _Author_ right? The elements are still used for key-value-lists and no one seems to notice or comment on this issue.

Am I the only one?

• WorldMaker

  today at 6:33 PM

  As the article points out, HTML5 softened the name from "definition list" to "description list" to move it a bit away from thinking of it as a "dictionary" definition and somewhat better reflect how it has always been used.

• myfonj

  today at 7:05 PM

  [dead]

Good title

[dead]