- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:34:54 +0300
On Oct 5, 2006, at 00:56, Simon Pieters wrote: > Which brings us to the next point: dialogue. The spec contains an > example[3] which suggests that <ol> is appropriate for dialogue. > I'm not convinced that it is. What makes a dialogue a list? While > the order of dialogue is important, so is the order of any other > paragraphs -- I don't think it should be emphasized in particular. I agree that using <ol> for dialog is weird. > I think I'd mark up the dialogue like this: > > <p> <cite>Costello</cite> > <q> Look, you gotta first baseman? </q> > <p> <cite>Abbott</cite> > <q> Certainly. </q> > ... I still think that <cite> should mean "title of work" and shouldn't be used for people, but that's another discussion. (I also think that <cite> lacks a proper use case that would justify its existence instead of just using <i> for titles of works and <b> for names of persons.) Anyway, to my point: HTML+ used <dl> for dialog. As far as default presentation goes, <dl> is the best fit for marking up dialog. Yet, the semantic markup party line is against it. I think there are two reasons for insisting that <dl> shouldn't be used for dialogs, i.e. that <dl> really is a definition list rather than a generic presentational grouping device: 1) Saving face after years of such insistence. 2) Avoiding breaking software that collects term definitions from <dl>s. I am not a fan of #1-style reasoning. My guess is that case #2 is already broken on the real Web. Is there a good reason for not prescribing <dl> for dialogs? -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen at iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Monday, 23 October 2006 02:34:54 UTC