There is one particular type of document in which the correct handling of the ordinal numbers of lists is paramount. A document type in which the ordinal numbers of the lists cannot be arbitrarily assigned by computer, dynamically, and in which the ordinal numbers of the lists are some of the most important content in the document.I'm referring of course to law.HTML, famously, was developed to represent scientific research papers, particularly physics papers. It should come as no surprise that it imagines documents to have things like headings and titles, but fails to imagine documents to have things like numbered clauses, the ordinal numbers of which were assigned by, for example, an act of the Congress of the United States of America.Of course this is not specific to any one body of law - pretty much all law is structured as nested ordered lists where the ordinal numbers are assigned by government body.It is just as true for every state in the Union, every country, every province, every municipality, every geopolitical subdivision in the world.HTML, from the first version right up to the present version, is fundamentally inimical to being used for marking up and serving legal codes as web pages. It can be done, of course - but you have to fight the HTML every step of the way. You have no access to any semantic markup for the task, because the only semantic markup for ordered lists is OL, which treats the ordinal numbers of ordered lists as presentation not content.

This graph view is the easiest possible mental model for RDF and is often used in easy-to-understand visual explanations

Text is not going away, but if we really want it to be understood and remembered, we should integrate it better with physical and emotional experience. This convergence may happen with the “physicalization” of the digital world, where digital experiences become part of our physical life.