Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

The “Giant Elf Who Loves Discussing Things” wonders exactly what the differences between ordered and unordered bulleted lists are:

At any rate, Matt and I were explaining the secrets of creating an ordered (numbered) list and an unordered (bulleted) list in html. At which point, Brian asked: why is a bulleted list “unordered”?

Matt and I responded, with stunning obviousness, that an ordered list has numbers. But then Brian showed us a preview of the post he was writing and sensibly asked “Is there any doubt about what order you should click on the links?”

Now I am trying to formulate a philosophy of numbered lists that distinguishes them from bulleted lists. Reader thoughts are welcome.

I’d argue that there’s a pretty obvious distinction. In this Yglesias post, for example, he has a bulleted, unordered list of thoughts on the recent foiled German terrorist plot. While he probably meant us to read the list in the order he presented it, the structural integrity of the list doesn’t require you read it in order. Also, the unordered list gives the appearance of equality between the bullet points, that one could read them in any order and still get everything he was trying to say. A numbered list has one of two implications. The first could be that bullets with a lower n value are simply more interesting or important to the point of the post, a sort of inverted pyramid of bullet-point blogging. The second possible implication of the numbered list is that the entries with a lower n must be read first and that points with values n+1 will only make sense in context of bullet n, and that n+2 only makes sense in context of n+1 and so on.