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Comment by mock-possum | Hacker News Reader

> The reversed attribute is used to reverse ordered lists (<ol>) in the opposite order.

Holy shit that’s been a thing for ten years and I didn’t know about it??

> > > The reversed attribute is used to reverse ordered lists (<ol>) in the opposite order.

To be clear, it only makes the numbers descending rather than ascending. The phrasing above implies it rearranges the list.

Yeah the behavior was completely counter intuitive to what I was expecting. It does make sense though since it would be kinda weird if an HTML attribute could change the structure of mark up directly, at least I realized that after thinking about it.

Well, IE and EdgeHTML never supported it, so in practice it’s only been safe to use for twoish years.

(I’d actually completely forgotten it was a recent addition rather than from the pre-HTML-5 era.)

How does this help accessibility, though? (Maybe I don't know enough about HTML. Is the usual way to produce a descending enumeration to write the elements in reverse order and then re-reverse them in CSS or so, which makes them be read wrong by screen readers?)

The alternative is just specifying the value on each item. These two are equivalent:

  <ol reversed>
    <li>Three
    <li>Two
    <li>One
  </ol>

  <ol>
    <li value=3>Three
    <li value=2>Two
    <li value=1>One
  </ol>

Note also that reversing content via CSS is generally unwise, because things like screen readers, text selection and tab indexing operate on DOM tree order.

That's a good point. There's no obvious way to mark up a HTML list as being reversed in CSS alone, at least not without a bunch of Flexbox styles and stuff. So the likelihood that someone would use an unsemantic alternative for this is basically non existent.

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