Earlier today my colleague was converting a document to HTML for one of our support and maintenance customers and asked how to change the start number of an unordered list. Believe it or not in the many years I’ve been doing web development this is the first time I’ve needed to do such a thing, so I did a quick search for attributes on the OL tag and found the following W3Schools page:
http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_ol.asp
To my surprise I found that although there is a ‘start’ attribute, it has been deprecated (meaning while it may work now its use should be avoided as it may well not be supported in the future). The alternative is to use the CSS counters.
This struck me as very odd since the very essence of CSS is about separating style from content, looks from semantics. But before I lost any faith in W3C (those responsible for HTML standards) I checked the latest specification for HTML 5.
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-ol-element
The good news is that they appear to have seen the error of their ways, and the start attribute is there once again.
