[whatwg] Thoughts on HTML 5 - dialog
Zachary Carter
zack.carter at gmail.com
Tue May 13 19:43:14 PDT 2008
FWIW, in my first encounter with HTML5 <dialog> I assumed it meant a
dialog box. This might be due to my experience with the <dialog>
element in XUL[1], which is used for that. Also, dialog boxes are
generally more common from my browsing experience, so I hadn't
considered the alternative usage at first.
[1]http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XUL:dialog
On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 8:08 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Tue, 13 May 2008, Ernest Cline wrote:
> >
>
> > I agree that the word "discourse" is more formal than "dialog", but it
> > does cover both formal and informal speech unlike some other thesaurus
> > inspired possibilities such as "colloquy" or "chat".
>
> Sure, I'm just reluctanct to use an element name that is too formal, as
> (for better or worse) that makes the language sound stilted.
>
>
>
> > It does have the advantage over dialog of avoiding the spelling issue
> > and the computer term issue. If those issues end up being judged
> > sufficient to make <dialog/> undesirable, then <discourse/> seems to me
> > to be the best alternative available among English words. Of course, if
> > words were abandoned altogether <d/> would also be a possibility.
>
> <d> is probably too short for an element that won't be used that much.
>
> Unless we get more evidence that the confusion with dialog boxes is a real
> blocker to adoption, I'm going to assume that <dialog> is our best option.
>
>
>
> --
> Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>
--
Zach Carter
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