Interactive online courses HTML Academy
2026-03-09 10:45 Diff

Here is a new blog entry about the “maladies” that coders are susceptible to. (Don’t worry! You won’t catch any of them if you are a diligent student in this course.) Each disease has a description, and some even have several such descriptions. The last list type (the description list) is the most suitable for marking up such information.

The description list is good for marking up questions and answers, terms and definitions, as well as categories and topics. It is created using three tags:

  • <dl> (short for “description list”) designates the description list itself;
  • <dt> (which is short for “description term”) designates the term;
  • <dd> (which is short for “description definition”) designates the description or definition.

The <dt> and <dd> tags are written within <dl>.

Each <dl> list can contain one or more terms and one or more descriptions for each term. Code example:

<dl> <dt>HTML</dt> <dd>Hypertext Markup Language</dd> <dt>CSS</dt> <dd>Cascading Style Sheets</dd> <dd>A language for formatting the presentation of HTML documents</dd> </dl>

By default, the browser adds a small indent to the left of the definitions.

You might see <dl> referred to as an “association list” (which the current HTML specification calls it), or as a “definition list” (as it was called in the previous version of HTML). They all mean the same thing.