Numbered lists with per-item titles

Phil Bull <philbull at gmail.com>
Mon Feb 20 08:49:28 EST 2012

Hi all,

I'm currently writing an introductory guide for software developers,
and came across a use-case that I don't think the Mallard spec
currently addresses completely. I would like to have a numbered list
in the following format:

1. Short, emphasised item title (bold)
    Longer format text which goes into detail about the subject of this point.
2. ...

The reason for this is that I would like to summarise the content of
each step with a little emphasis, to facilitate scanning of the list,
and then to have comparatively de-emphasised content that provides the
detailed information for each point. The idea is that the reader may
want to skip some steps, but not others. I don't want to make the user
have to start reading the start of each list item before they decide
whether to skip it or not.

I could abuse <steps> slightly to achieve this, like so:

<steps>
 <item>
  <p><em style="strong">Short, emphasised item title</em></p>
  <p>Longer format text which goes into detail about the subject of
this point.</p>
 </item>
</steps>

but I think the following would probably be cleaner and less tied to a
specific processing tool implementation:

<steps>
 <item>
  <title>Short, emphasised item title</title>
  <p>Longer format text which goes into detail about the subject of
this point.</p>
 </item>
</steps>

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull