[whatwg] Thoughts on HTML 5 - dialog

[Ian Hickson]

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.

-- 
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