Some sample lists using styles

I have been talking in email with Stuart Stuple, a Microsoft Program Manager for Word.

Stuart asked me to clarify what I meant by ‘a list’ – I thought I’d do so publicly because if I’m confusing the experts then I might be confusing some of the rest of you.

I’ll start with some lists that Stuart sent me, and show you how they look in Word.

Stuart’s list:

1. My point

   1. Ordered entry

   2. Ordered entry

   3. Ordered entry

2. My point

   • Unordered entry

   • Unordered entry

Here’s a screenshot of how that looks in Word when I’m writing it:

The styles show to the left. You don’t need to remember the cryptic names, though, as there is a nice menu for applying them and keyboard shortcuts:

What we have here is three lists. An ‘outer’ numbered list with two sub-lists, one ordered and one unordered.  You can view the source of this page to see how it comes out in HTML. If you’re viewing this page via the ATOM feed on my site then you may not see the correct style of numbering, ICE needs to be fixed up so it adds a ‘style’ attribute to lists.

<p>Stuart’s list:</p>
    <ol class="lin">
        <li>
            <p>My point</p>
            <ol class="li-lower-alpha">
                <li>
                    <p>Ordered entry</p>
                </li>
                <li>
                    <p>Ordered entry</p>
                </li>
                <li>
                    <p>Ordered entry</p>
                </li>
            </ol>
        </li>
        <li>
            <p>My point</p>
            <ul class="lib">
                <li>
                    <p>Unordered entry</p>
                </li>
                <li>
                    <p>Unordered entry</p>
                </li>
            </ul>
        </li>
    </ol>

The three lists are implied by the styles. There is no actual list structure underneath, except what Word constructs internally – and authors don’t have to worry too much about that because the ICE styles clearly imply the nesting.

You can’t use a single outline list to do this, because there are two different things going on at the second level. Outline lists would be good if you were working in an environment (like law) where the numbering is always going to be a certain way. More on outline lists below.

Another of Stuart’s lists:

1. Test1

   1. Sample paragraph

      Separate paragraph

   2. Another sample paragraph

2. Test2

   Test3

   Test4

Here we have two lists. I’d say that the above is one two-item list (Test 1, Test 2) with another list embedded in it.

Looks like this in the word processor:

You can see that to continue a list item you use the ‘liXp’ style where ‘X’ is the appropriate level.

A new lists starts when you put in a style that implies it. So if you have a paragraph in plain-old ‘p’ style followed by a li1n then that means start a new numbered list. The algorithm is fairly simple. Does the next item belong inside the same container as me? If so, include it, otherwise close the container and start a new one.

The styles are a kind of contract with the ICE software. And they can mix and match with other styles like blockquotes and pre-formatted text. So if I were to quote someone I would use a blockquote style. Let’s quote the example above.

Putting the first line in bq1 style starts a new quote, and the styles imply that the lists belong in the quote.

Another of Stuart’s lists:

1. Test1

   1. Sample paragraph

      Separate paragraph

   2. Another sample paragraph

2. Test2

   Test3

   Test4

Or I could include preformatted text in a list, say in a user guide:

1. Type this:

   cd ~
   ls
   

2. Make a cup of tea.

Which looks like this with the styles showing:

Without styles converting this stuff to HTML is basically impossible; how do you know where lists start and end? Which bits are quotes? Which bits are pre-formatted?

Behind the scenes, our lists are actually associated with Word outline lists. Here’s another screenshot showing the Bullets and Numbering…  dialog This is showing the formatting for the style ‘li3a’.  This is part of the outline called LLowercaseAlpha. I’m still not sure why this optional name field was not used more fully in Word and why list styles were introduced.

(Don’t try this at home, kids. Read my previous post about how to manage lists using macros. Even while writing this post I had some bizarre and unusual things happen to my lists, but because I’m using the ICE template I can run a macro to fix up most of the issues.)

We don’t set up outline lists for every possible combination, because it’s not possible, but we do use them to group together all the formatting for each type of numbering. So all five levels of lowercase Roman numbered lists are part of the same outline.

There’s lots more to this list business but we find that with a couple of hours of experience most users get the hang of it. The best teacher is the ICE rendering system which turns styled Word documents into HTML in a couple of seconds, so users can see how their implied lists are interpreted by the ICE formatting software.

I’d love to see a similar (optional) approach in Word 2007 for blogging and general-purpose HTML export.

Why not make an ICE-like template that bloggers can use to produce posts like this one, complete with lovely nested structures?