I have used <ol type=”a”> in my markup. The W3C validator tells me that this is invalid. How can I change the “type” of an ordered list’s the list without using this attribute?

Answer:

The type attribute associated with the <ul> , <ol> and <li> has been deprecated as it is considered style information. This means it should be achieved using CSS rather than markup.

Ideally, authors should use the list-style-type property which can specify a wide range of options including:

• disc
• circle
• square
• decimal
• decimal-leading-zero
• lower-roman
• upper-roman
• lower-greek
• lower-alpha
• lower-latin
• upper-alpha
• upper-latin
• hebrew
• armenian
• georgian
• cjk-ideographic
• hiragana
• katakana
• hiragana-iroha
• katakana-iroha

So, the preferred markup would be something like:

HTML:

<ol class="lower-alpha" class="class-name">

CSS:

.class-name { list-style-type: lower-alpha; }

I noticed that some sites use the code below. What is this used for?

<meta name="robots" content="noodp" />

Answer:

First of all, this is a meta element. When used, it must be placed in the head of html documents. The meta element is used to provide meta information about a document. The meta element must have a property (name) and a value (content).

In this case, the value (content) is “noodp” – which stands for “No Open Directory Project”.

But what the hell does this mean?

Google automatically creates the title and description (or “snippet”) for each site – using the content of a page as well as references to the page that appear on other sites.

Google sometimes users descriptions within the Open Director Project to generate “snippets”. But what if you don’t like the snippet that is being used?

To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using information from the Open Directory Project for the page’s description, you can use the following:

HTML:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp">

XHTML:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp" />

To specifically prevent Google from using information from the Open Directory Project for a page’s description, you can use the following:

HTML:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp">

XHTML:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp" />

Further reading:

• How do I change my site’s title and description?
• More control over page snippets

So, do you use this on any of your sites? Do you find it necessary any more?