Re: Implementor feedback on new elements in HTML5

Jonas Sicking On 09-09-01 07.55:

> On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 2:29 AM, Maciej Stachowiak<mjs@apple.com> wrote:
>> (Additional comments are personal feedback only.)
>>
>> On Aug 31, 2009, at 10:14 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>
>>> Great feedback Maciej,
>>>
>>> At mozilla we have yet to do a detailed review of the new elements, so
>>> I can't give as detailed feedback at the time. However it feels like I
>>> personally generally agree. Some comments and cases I didn't agree
>>> with below:
>>>
>>>> - <dialog> element
>>>>  This essentially gives the same behavior as <dl> but with appropriate
>>>> semantics for logs of conversations. It seems useful and easy to
>>>> implement.
>>> Useful for what? I don't yet understand what anyone needs this element
>>> for.
>> One example would be markup for a chat log. I'm personally not sure it adds
>> a lot of value for this case, but I'm not sure if there is an existing good
>> way to mark up logs of conversations, and it seems like a fairly common use
>> case.
> 
> What use is marking up a chat log? What value does it add?
> 
>> I don't feel strongly about this, but it doesn't seem like
>> implementing it would be a problem.
> 
> Indeed, implementing <dialog> in a browser is trivial. A feature that
> isn't used, or mostly used wrongly, still adds a cost (spec bloat,
> tutorial bloat, author confusion, name collisions with future features
> etc), my concern is purely that.


FWIW, I have always found it "dumb" that I have to change <ol> to 
<ul> in order to get a un-numerated list - and vice-versa. The 
semantical difference between <ol> and <ul> is also much to 
fine-grained (well, it is an obvious difference, but one must 
twist one's head to get it) to warrant a separate element for 
both. CSS have just underlined the lack of usefulness of having 
both an unordered and ordered list format.  I would have found it 
much better if the semantics just followed the the list style - 
and in fact, both in Opera 9.x, Firefox and IE8, if you write <ul 
type="A">, you get an ordered list ...

All this to day that I agree with the view that we don't need 
<dialog>. I would much rather have had <dl dialog> or <dl 
type="dialog">. But if the choice is between <dialog> and a bare 
naked <dl>, then I am less certain ...

Does ARIA have anything to add? Does ARIA have something like the 
dialog element? (Sorry if the question has already been asked.)
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Tuesday, 1 September 2009 17:53:54 UTC