Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

Creating and Formatting Lists

Lists organize the everyday information of our lives: to-do lists, grocery lists, least favorite celebrity lists, and so on. On web pages, lists are indispensable for presenting groups of items, such as links, company services, or a series of instructions.

HTML offers formatting options for three basic types of list (see Figure 3-4). The two most common are bulleted lists (called unordered lists in HTML-speak) and numbered lists (called ordered lists in HTML). The third and lesser-known list type, the definition list, comes in handy when you want to create glossaries or dictionary entries.

Bulleted and Numbered Lists

Bulleted and numbered lists share similar formatting. Dreamweaver automatically indents items in both types of list, and automatically precedes each list item by a character—a bullet, number, or letter, for example:

• Unordered, or bulleted, lists, like this one, are good for groups of items that don’t necessarily follow any sequence. A web browser precedes each list item with a bullet.

• Ordered lists are useful when presenting items that follow a sequence, such as the numbered instructions in the following section. Instead of a bullet, a number or letter precedes each item in an ordered list. Dreamweaver suggests a number (1, 2, 3, and so on), but you can substitute Roman numerals, letters, and other variations.

You can create a list from scratch within Dreamweaver, or apply list formatting to text already on a page.

Creating a new bulleted or numbered ...