- From: Michel Fortin <michel.fortin@michelf.com>
- Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2006 10:41:30 -0500
Le 31 oct. 2006 ? 16:26, Henri Sivonen a ?crit : >> I know it has already been discussed, but I'd suggest this: >> >> <dialog> > > What benefits do consumers of HTML get from knowing that something > is a dialog? > > What tangible benefits can authors see from marking up dialogs as > dialogs? That is, what is the incentive to bother? > > If most authors are not incentivized to mark up their dialogs as > such, is there still enough value for consumers of markup if only > relatively few dialogs are marked up as dialogs? Those are legitimate questions. People have asked how to markup dialogs for a long time, but many are reluctant to use <dl> because it is named "definition list" and a dialog has absolutely nothing to do with a definition list (basically a dialog does not define anything, and it isn't a list more than a couple of adjacent paragraphs form a list). Well, if it comes that <dl> can be used for dialogs, fine. But I believe that introducing a <dialog> element will makes things clearer, as HTML4 has explicitly proposed the use of <dl> for dialogs and many people still find that dumb. Is there a value in knowing something is a dialog? Not always, that's certain. But in certain contexts it is important for styling as there's no punctuation to tell what is a dialog and what is not. That's when <dl> was used. > Why not just use punctuation for the quotations? Indeed. I rarely use <q> myself. But I know other people who do. Why is there a <q> element in the first place? Sometimes I wonder. Picking up a different voice in screen readers could be one reason. But now that I reread the spec, <q> is possibly inappropriate for dialogs: "The <q> element represents a part of a paragraph quoted from another source". Does fictional dialog speech qualifies for a quote from another source? I don't know. So maybe I should have used quotes characters instead of <q>. And, for the same reasons, I'm not sure anymore that <cite> is appropriate in a dialog. Maybe it could be said that <cite> has a special meaning inside a <dialog> element. > If printed text in French (and other languages) works with the > dialog dash style > without visual hints where you put the <q> and </q> tags, why would > an author > want to go though the trouble of tagging the dialog like that and > then making sure > that any styling on the <q> element is suppressed? As ?istein suggested, text could be italicised (as some newspapers do), or as I suggested above it could be used to speak the text in another voice (which could be useful even in a novel). The <q> element may be inappropriate for dialogs however, both semantically (refers to another source?) and visually (automatically-inserted quotation marks). And thus these were my two points: 1. there is no way to distinguish quoted text in a quotation from unquoted material inserted within the quotation marks; 2. there is no way to identify a dialog, and to identify inside a dialog what is spoken text and what comes from the narrator (I made some mockups using <q> inside <dialog> in my first post, but my conclusion is that <q> doesn't seem appropriate for this, because of the quotes and possibly because of the semantics of <q>). I'm not sure yet what could be proposed for this, but it'd be nice if a similar markup can be used for quotations and other spoken text. (And it'd be nice if such markup can work in Internet Explorer without ugly hacks. [1]) [1]: http://alistapart.com/articles/qtag >> <dialog> >> <p><cite>Mary:</cite> So where do you want to go tomorrow? I >> can tell >> you already have something in mind.</p> >> <p><cite>Mark:</cite> What makes you think that?</p> >> </dialog> > > Why is that better than <dl>? And why is <dl> better than that? If you don't care about semantics, they're probably equivalent: both have decent default styles. If you care about semantics, using <dl> for dialog removes every bit of meaning left in <dl> as "an unordered list of associations". Michel Fortin michel.fortin at michelf.com http://www.michelf.com/
Received on Wednesday, 1 November 2006 07:41:30 UTC