Dreamweaver CS6: 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 sets of instructions.

HTML offers formatting options for three basic types of lists (see Figure 2-9). The two most common are bulleted lists (called unordered lists in HTML) 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 list items in both cases, and automatically precedes each item with 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 a sequence. Browsers precede each list item with a bullet.

• Ordered lists are useful when you want to present items that follow a sequence, such as the numbered instructions in the section below. 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 that’s already on a page.

Figure 2-9. HTML has several predefined ...