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

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Mar 21, 2006, at 6:23 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:
>
> On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>>
>> Ian Hickson wrote:
> ...
>>> 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.
> ...

Does that mean the HTML and CSS specifications are badly designed when 
they use the word "color"? (Or that one of the early Risc OS Web 
browsers was correct in recognizing the "colour" attribute as well?)

Sometimes the best word for something is one that's often misspelled, 
and I agree with Lachlan it's not a problem in this case. People leave 
language= misspelled only because it has no obvious effect. With 
<gauge>, as with "color", the result will be very obvious and the 
correct spelling quickly learned.

-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/