[whatwg] A better name than <gauge> for the element that shows a measurement

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Mon Mar 20 21:33:12 PST 2006


So one of the HTML5 elements is <gauge>:

   Relevancy: <gauge>70%</gauge>

Unfortunately, the study Google did on Web authors showed that authors 
cannot spell the word "language", and I see no reason to believe that they 
might spell "gauge" either. Also, I've typoed the word "gauge" three times 
so far in this e-mail, and in the thread where <gauge> was first 
mentioned, it was spelt in at least two different ways intentionally 
(without even counting the typos in that thread).

So. <gauge> is out. What better element name can people think of? I asked 
in some IRC channels, and looked at thesaurii, and the some of the ideas 
I've so far dismissed are:

   <meter> -- looks odd when taken out of context
   <indicator> -- too close to "<progress> indicator"
   <display> -- too generic
   <counter> -- too confusable with hit counters
   <level> -- too generic
   <level-indicator> -- too long

<meter> is the best so far. I'm not sure it's better than <gauge>.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'



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