Haha, so many answers!
When HTML first appeared, there were OL and UL , which, as all other posters said, means an ordered list and an unordered list.
The difference was simple. OL displayed ... next to them. Or a Roman numeral, or a letter! You could even control if it uses uppercase letters or lowercase letters! Cool!
UL gave you bullets. 3 types of bullets, even - discs (hollow circles), squares (filled squares), circles (filled circles).
There was no CSS. Apart from these attributes, there really was no way to customize the list formats (both margins and indents and everything else). Therefore, this distinction was important.
Currently all of his CSS. In fact, w3 people want you to use styles, not the html attribute of the type you used. So using UL vs OL doesn't really matter if you're one of them - newfangled CSS users.
CSS allows you to change the bullet type or select an image or change the margins / styles / indents or not even display a marker at all.
Edit again: this answer is not really intended to address the semantic merits of UL and OL. But technically (you know, in bits and bytes) the differences in behavior are outlined above.
poundifdef Jun 24 '09 at 18:06 2009-06-24 18:06
source share