I wrote this a while back. What y’all think? I disagree with a lot

A while back on the WSG mailing list someone asked about correct markup for legal documents. Having worked for the Department for Courts/Ministry of Justice I had often thought about this, so it was of some interest to me.

Simply put, legal documents, such as judgments have numbered paragraphs throughout, with heading spaced in between them e.g.

<h3>Section 1</h3>
<p>1.  Paragraph 1</p>
<p>2.  Paragraph 2</p>
<h3>Section 2</h3>
<p>3.  Paragraph 3</p>
<p>4.  Paragraph 4</p>

While this displays alright, semantically speaking its not very nice, and is a pain if you decide to move a paragraph from one section to another while editing the document. However, it does have the advantage that once a documment is finalised the numbers are tied to the content.

Next I thought what about

<h3>Section 1</h3>
<ol>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
</ol>
<ol>
<h3>Section 2</h3>
<li start="3">Item 3<li>
<li>Item 4</li>
</ol>

While I think it’s better than the first example, if you want to use it you are forced to use a transitional doctype as start is not a strict attribute. Also, it has the disadvantage that the numbering is not inherently tied to the paragraph, which it the big plus of the first example.

In the CSS2 Recomendation, W3C have included automatic numbering. Unfortunately UA support is limited

What do y’all think?