Question

I think the answer to this question is no… but does anyone know of a an HTML/CSS way to create an ordered list without a period after the numbers? Or, alternatively, to specify the separator character?

Ideally I don’t want to do list-style-image with a different class for each number, but that’s all I’ve been able to think of so far… That seems terribly unsemantic.

IE:

Default Style:
1. ______
2. ______
3. ______

Desired Style:
1  ______
2  ______
3  ______

Alternate Style:
1) ______
2) ______
3) ______

Answer 1

This is perfectly possible to do with just CSS (2.1):

ol.custom {
  list-style-type: none;
  margin-left: 0;
}

ol.custom > li {
  counter-increment: customlistcounter;
}

ol.custom > li:before {
  content: counter(customlistcounter) " ";
  font-weight: bold;
  float: left;
  width: 3em;
}

ol.custom:first-child {
  counter-reset: customlistcounter;
}

Keep in mind that this solution relies on the :before pseudo-selector, so some older browsers — IE6 and IE7 in particular — won’t render the generated numbers. For those browsers, you’ll want to add an extra CSS rule that targets just them to use the normal list-style:

ol.custom {
  *list-style-type: decimal; /* targets IE6 and IE7 only */
}