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

On 16 Sep 2009, at 00:34, Eric Eggert wrote:

> 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>).

I like the idea of a sectioning element called <dialog>, in the same  
way that <article> is a special case sectioning element, so could this  
be. How people mark up their chat after that should be left up to  
them, and not defined in the spec because dialogue varies quite a bit  
in mark-up requirements when you get into it. As for an element for a  
speaker, I think that sort of thing should be left to microformats et  
alia.

>
> 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
>
> Waldfischbacher Straße 20, 66978 Leimen/Pfalz, Deutschland
> Laudongasse 36/714, 1080 Wien, Österreich
>
> http://yatil.de/ | http://snookerblog.de/
>

--
Stephen Stewart
www.carisenda.com

Received on Tuesday, 15 September 2009 23:48:27 UTC