Re: Speakers in Dialogues (Was: what is dt?)

I’m totally unhappy that <dialog> was just removed from the spec. For
me there is a valid argument that a dialog should marked up along the
same lines on every page. Telling people to do what they want is not a
good solution in this context.

I think there is a need for marking up dialogs in general, there
wouldn’t be the (bad) example in the HTML4 spec nor would someone have
ever thought about an dialog element.

If we leave out a dedicated dialog element there should be a <section
type="dialog"> (or similar) to hold dialogs, there should be a
dedicated element to describe a speaker (like <speaker> or, more
versatile, <name>).

And then we need to tie the different pieces together with dialog elements.

My proposal would be:

- Create a section of the type dialog
- Inside the section every block level element is a dialog element.
- If it contains a speaker (or name) it is part of the dialog
- If it does not contain a speaker it is instructional text

I think this should be a quite robust solution as it would work for
many different examples of dialogs in various situations. I see that
there are some problems with this approach if there is a name in the
instructions, which may create a need to have separate name and
speaker elements. But that would of course confuse authors even more.

I’d really like to see a nice solution to the problem, just getting
rid and even resorting to the <b> element is mad. (And I don’t like at
all how the b element is defined but that is probably another mail.)

Regards, Eric

2009/9/16 Smylers <Smylers@stripey.com>:
> I just wrote:
>
>> Perhaps the spec could soften its encouragement to authors over
>> conversations, merely mentioning <p> and <b> as one plausible way of
>> doing it.
>
> Wow, and within seconds of my typing that Ian has updated the spec
> exactly along those lines:
>
>  http://www.whatwg.org/html5#conversations
>
> In fact, I see he actually managed to do that shortly before I pressed
> 'Send' on my mail ... Ian, are you watching over my shoulder here,
> reading what I type before I even submit it to the list?
>
> Smylers
>



-- 
Eric Eggert

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Received on Tuesday, 15 September 2009 23:35:46 UTC