ul and menu elements should unambiguously describe that "unordered" refers only to author's meaning

[gh-andre]

What is the issue with the HTML Standard?

The description for the ul element states:

The ul element represents a list of items, where the order of the items is not important — that is, where changing the order would not materially change the meaning of the document.

This extends to the menu element, whose description states:

The menu element is simply a semantic alternative to ul to express an unordered list of commands (a "toolbar").

The description of the ul element should unambiguously describe that "unordered" really means "not numbered", which in turns means that the author did not place any specific meaning on the order of elements in the list, not that the list is unordered in the way user agents may render it.

More specifically, "unordered" has a specific meaning in computing, such that an "unordered map" does not guarantee the order of elements, which may change if, say, the underlying hashing algorithm changes. The ul, and especially menu elements, don't fall in that category in that their order should not be changed by user agents based on some implementation detail and should always be in tree order.

Lastly, the HTML 4.01 specification does say that "unordered" just, means "not numbered":

Ordered and unordered lists are rendered in an identical manner except that visual user agents number ordered list items. User agents may present those numbers in a variety of ways. Unordered list items are not numbered.

https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/lists.html#h-10.2