Shouldn't we suggest unordered lists (ul li) for dropdown menus?

I’ve noticed that BS4 has stopped suggesting unordered lists for dropdown menus. I’m wondering why since lists provide semantics in the HTML (think of accessibility and unstyled content). Now the code samples only use divs:

• BS4 dropdown-menu example (with divs and classes)
• BS3 dropdown-menu example (with ul li)

Interestingly enough, the result is the same in BS4 when using lists. Is there a reason for removing list markup from the code samples? Would it make sense to put this back in?

[dannycolin]

@rafalp the problem here seems to be that the documentation in the navbar section use <div> instead of <ul>. In that case, the dropdown element is clearly a sublist.

And as @bittner mentioned it, people are (sadly) copy/pasting the code verbatim.

The consequence of that is lot of site don’t respect the semantic of HTML and they also don’t respect WAI-ARIA standard. The result is that people who use assistive technologies are clearly affected by that.

So, I think that we should, at least, add a mention in the documentation pointing out that it is important to use the right HTML tag depending on here you use a dropdown menu.

Sorry, I know, I’m that annoying person pointing out that a11y is an important thing 😃.

[rafalp]

BS3 dropdown-menu example (with ul li)

I would like to point out for sake of balanced argument that thinking of dropdown menu as ul list of li is what has bitten us in back in BS3 times, where bootstrap’s dropdown menu meant this:

And obviously markup was light and semantic, but in web apps dropdowns can get quite complex:

So I would like to advice us against fixating on past approach too much.