Re: Implementor feedback (dialog and datepickers)

Lars Gunther On 09-09-02 13.10:

> 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.

Even if your students change <dl> to <dialog>, they will still 
stumble upon the unintuitive thing that <dialog> contains <dt> and 
<dd>, which has no meaning what so ever inside a dialog. Thus they 
will be unable to understand dialog unless they know <dl> first.

I find it pointless with separate UL and OL elements - a common 
list element would have bether, in my mind. But at least those 
show a visual difference when you switch from <ul> to <ol> and 
vice versa.

HTML is *full* of elements which change - or refines - the meaning 
based on what the type attribute says - or through the mere 
presence of another.  One could also introduce different, new 
subtypes of the DL element.

This can be said to be more intuitive than a dialog element which 
has no clear link to its child elements. It would also be more 
backward-compatible.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Wednesday, 2 September 2009 16:14:19 UTC