Re: Implementor feedback (dialog and datepickers)

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 8:10 AM, Lars Gunther<gunther@keryx.se> wrote:
> 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.

The semantic information could indeed be used for this. This is the
only suggestion of use that I've heard for it though. However the same
effect can be accomplished using the 'voice-family' property [1] in
UAs that support CSS.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/aural.html#propdef-voice-family

> 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.

Including using Aural stylesheets?

> 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.

Indeed.

>> 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.

Agreed.

> 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.

I would actually rather say "common ones" rather than "easy ones".
There's far too many things that are easy to add a tag for, for HTML
to add all of them.

/ Jonas

Received on Wednesday, 2 September 2009 15:12:52 UTC