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

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> But unlike the almost entirely useless "language" attribute, gauge will 
> actually have a noticeable result in future browsers and so if it's 
> typed incorrectly, the author would not see the result and, hopefully, 
> go and fix it.  Whereas if they mistype language, they won't notice the 
> error until they validate.

That makes it easier for them to correct it, but it doesn't make it easier 
for them to type it in the first place.


> >    <meter> -- looks odd when taken out of context
> 
> But "metre" is the correct spelling in en-AU and en-GB, and so I think 
> much of the world outside of the US may misspell it.

Whatever word we pick, it won't be in the language of the majority of 
authors, unless we switch to Chinese for HTML tag names.


> I'd prefer to find a word without spelling differences between 
> countries, if possible. Although I guess, just like 'color' and 
> 'colour', authors could get used to it.

I agree, <meter> isn't really better than <gauge>, but not that <gauge> 
also has spelling differences between countries, so that's not a reason 
to use it.

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