Can you have <li>s without them being under a <ul> or <ol>?

Question

I have a navigation that I am using a list for. I have it in a <ul>, but that is messing up my UI because it has weird automatic margins. I tried without the <ul> and they seem to work. Would this work across all browsers? Is this legal? Anybody else done this before?

Answer 1

It's not valid HTML to use <li> outside an ol, ul, or menu element. It's much better to assign a class to the ul element:

<ul class="nav">

And then use CSS to remove the margin and padding:

.nav {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}

Answer 2

It's probably working in browsers because browsers are too forgiving, but that's not valid says the validator:

Document type does not allow element "li" here; missing one of "ul", "ol", "menu", "dir" start-tag

Well, you can remove customize margins in CSS. That's your only solution. Generally, you can remove it on all <ul> tags in the documents by:

ul {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}

In case you're wondering what padding is, see it here.