Volition

Now that everyone is using HTML unordered lists for their navigation menus these days instead of a bunch of meaningless links separated with line breaks (right, everyone?), life on the web is much nicer.

But still, one thing that annoys me about this approach is the over-use of headings needed to give nested nav-list something that is more like a title. You end up with a twisty maze of differently-styleed heading elements which makes your document outline much less useful.

Stu Nicholls has come up with a very nice solution: use definition lists instead. He is advocating that designers should use them instead of the usual unordered lists in general, but I think it is still reasonable to use the latter when you don't need a title-like-thing for your nav-lists. For the main nav menu of a web site, for example.

I would suggest the first of the three use-cases that he, err, lists is the way to go. The second can (should?) be accomplished using title attributes on the anchor element and the third is just a variant on the second.