Does Google penalise lists in nav menus?

[Gemini23]

Has anyone experience of this? I am currently ranking fairly well with some reasonable search terms. I have sought advice on CSS and other xhtml issues and some 'experts' have advised that I should change my two side-navigation bars from DIVS with <br />:
<div id="left_col">
<br />
<a href="xyz.widgets.com/">Home</a><br />
<a href="xyz.widgets.com/green.html">Green Widgets</a><br />
ditto
ditto

to...
<div id="left_col">
<u>
<li><a href=".widgets.com/">Home</a></li></u>
<li><a href="xyz.widgets.com/green.html">RedWidgets</a></li>
ditto ditto

Not sure if I have copied the coding exactly... but hopefully you get the idea. Essentially to change the current so that they are in a 'list' format. There are 90+ links. Bottom line is that I have pages that are ranking quite well and I don't want to upset the apple cart!

[tedster]

Using a list for menu links is semantically correct - it's really the "proper" way to mark-up a menu, since it is a list of similar items. But using that choice, or using divs or even table cells should have no effect on your ranking.

[mrMister]

Yes, I agree with tedster that is the correct way to mark up a menu.

Personally, I'd get rid of the div because it's not needed, try this instead...

<ul id="left_col">  
  <li><a href="/">Home</a></li></u>  
  <li><a href="/green.html">Green Widgets</a></li>  
</ul> 

[Gemini23]

Thanks very much for this, where the <ul> opens the 'list' does where should the closing </ul> be? Is it necessary to open and close for each item on the list or can it be opened at the start and closed at the end?

I notice in the example from mrMister that there is only 1 open <ul> but 2 closing </ul> is that correct?

[edited by: Gemini23 at 10:43 am (utc) on April 24, 2009]

[HelenDev]

I think that is a typo from copying and pasting. <u> means underline and is not generally used any more.

<ul> means a list and there should be an opening <ul> before all of your <li>List Item</li> items, and only one closing </ul> which should go after the end of all the list items.

[eltercerhombre]

About closing items: it depends on what flavour of HTML you use.

Per example, in HTML 4.01 Transitional you do not need to close the <li> (some others elements are also allowed to not be closed).

I'm a fan of validating the HTML, but I still use this option on some sites (remove the </li>, per example) to make the page weight less (I'm a fan of speed and yes, I also remove extra carriage returns, extra black spaces...)

[HelenDev]

in HTML 4.01 Transitional you do not need to close the <li>

You may be right but it would make me feel ill ;)

[Gemini23]

mrMister, can I ask - you say 'get rid' of the Div Id's and replace them with 'ul? simply rename them in the DWT that I use?