There ARE some things that html lists do naturally that are very, very hard to completely replicate with css and block elements (consistently across a range of devices/apps anyway), but they're still purely cosmetic. Unless you're continually rebuilding a list where the number of elements and their contents are unknown and/or pulled from a database and built "on the fly" (such as on dynamic websites), then you're right; there's no real functional advantage to ordered lists in static documents.
|