Re: Implementor feedback (dialog and datepickers)

2009-09-01 07:14, Jonas Sicking wrote (and a lot of people spoke after 
him, mostly from an implementation perspective):
>> -<dialog>  element
>
> Useful for what? I don't yet understand what anyone needs this element for.

To mark up a dialog. From Shakespeare to interviews and chat. If dl 
should have some kind of meaning it must not continue to abused for 
this. All other proposed solutions I've seen are crufty or non-intuitive.

Screen readers could perhaps be modified to speak different persons' 
lines with separate voices.

When my students do dialogs I see a lot of <b>ed and <br>eakfast markup, 
even though I explicitly teach them to avoid it. Why? All other 
solutions are way too complicated.

What's non intuitive today is how one adds events or instructions to the 
text, such as someone leaving the chat or Hamlet and and Laertes have at 
each other using their swords.

> We had a recent discussion about this one at mozilla. There was a lot
> of concern that even if we added date-pickers to the platform they
> wouldn't get used since authors wanted a consistent look with the rest
> of the page. So this might be similar to<progress>  in that regard.

That is a valid concern, but there are also pages that will need to go 
up quickly for some specific occasion, and perhaps only for a small 
group. I also see this being used on administrative pages that are not 
visible to the public and thus perhaps not in a great need of branding.

A simple way to do date pickers are a very frequent request I hear from 
my students. They are often charged with making simple sites for their 
cousin's rock band (add gig dates) or a dad's small company.

Do think about the professionals and big companies. I just thought I'd 
remind everyone that there also are a lot of beginners and amateurs 
around. So what if some developers do not use native date-pickers 
because they have additional needs? Other developers will benefit greatly.

What these two (dialog and datepickers) have in common is that even 
though HTML probably never can have semantics for every single use case, 
at least it should be able to handle the easy ones.

-- 
Lars Gunther
http://keryx.se/
http://twitter.com/itpastorn/
http://itpastorn.blogspot.com/

Received on Wednesday, 2 September 2009 11:11:27 UTC