It is not quite true that it's just a way of formatting, there is a semantic element to it as well where someone parsing your document programmatically can now know that what you have is a list of terms paired with their descriptions. In fact, when exporting to html you get a description list which is one of the most underused-yet-everyone-should-use-it-more html elements.

On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:37 AM William Denton <wtd@pobox.com> wrote:
On 17 June 2022, Cletip Cletip wrote:

> Final question : why do you use description lists and not another ?

When I have a list of things I want to briefly descibe!  That's all.  It's just
a way of formatting a list of things where there's a term (a word, a name, a
title) that has some descriptive text.  Sometimes I use them when there's an
obvious term/description pairing, and sometimes when I have a text-heavy list of
things and I want to have a brief summary of each to make it easier to read.


Bill

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William Denton
https://www.miskatonic.org/
Librarian, artist and licensed private investigator.
Toronto, Canada