Making a search result list (like in Google) is not very hard, if you just need something that works. Now, however, I want to do it with perfection, using the benefits of HTML5 semantics. The goal is to define the defacto way of marking up a search result list that potentially could be used by any future search engine.
For each hit, I want to
- order them by increasing number
- display a clickable title
- show a short summary
- display additional data like categories, publishing date and file size
My first idea is something like this:
<ol>
<li>
<article>
<header>
<h1>
<a href="url-to-the-page.html">
The Title of the Page
</a>
</h1>
</header>
<p>A short summary of the page</p>
<footer>
<dl>
<dt>Categories</dt>
<dd>
<nav>
<ul>
<li><a href="first-category.html">First category</a></li>
<li><a href="second-category.html">Second category</a></li>
</ul>
</nav>
</dd>
<dt>File size</dt>
<dd>2 kB</dd>
<dt>Published</dt>
<dd>
<time datetime="2010-07-15T13:15:05-02:00" pubdate>Today</time>
</dd>
</dl>
</footer>
</article>
</li>
<li>
...
</li>
...
</ol>
I am not really happy about the <article/> within the <li/>. First, the search result hit is not an article by itself, but just a very short summary of one. Second, I am not even sure you are allowed to put an article within a list.
Maybe the <details/> and <summary/> tags are more suitable than <article/>, but I don't know if I can add a <footer/> inside that?
All suggestions and opinions are welcome! I really want every single detail to be perfect.