Numbered and Alphabetized Lists

Along with bulleted lists, you can also create numbered or alphabetized lists which are known in HTML as ordered lists. To render an ordered list, you use the ol element which requires both an <ol> start tag and an </ol> end tag. Between these tags you must place at least one or more list items, each of which are preceded by an <li> start tag (end tag is optional).

The following example illustrates:

Ordering Styles

The list in Example 1 uses the the default '1, 2, 3' ordering style. You can, however, explicitly define the ordering style by using the type attribute in the <ol> tag. The type attribute employs one of the following values and "orders" the list according to the given example:

Value	Ordering Style
1	1, 2, 3, ...
i	i, ii, iii, ...
I	I, II, III, ...
a	a, b, c, ...
A	A, B, C, ...

To illustrate, let's take the list we used in Example 1 and alphabetize it using lower-case characters:

Nesting Lists

You can nest other lists inside of ordered lists and you can even nest an unordered list inside of an ordered list thus making for a more sophisticated display. To illustrate, let's add some nested bulleted lists to our running example to flesh out some more details about the basic steps to creating a web page.

In the following example, the top-level numbered lists appear in Maroon Bold. Nested inside these are second-level bulleted lists which appear in Green.

Picking Up Where You Left Off

But let's say, for example, that you wanted to create series of lists where the ordering system of each succeeding list picked up where the last one left off? This can be easily accomplished using the start attribute in the <ol> tag. The start attribute specifies which character to use to start the ordering style of the respective list. Hence, if you wanted a list to display items 4, 5, and 6, you would use the type="1" attribute-value pair along with the start="4" attribute-value pair and then insert three list items.

The following example will illustrate:





Aside from bulleted lists and numbered lists, there is a third style which lends itself to formatting text into a list of terms and their respective definitions and is appropriately called a definition list...