[whatwg] Thoughts on HTML 5 - dialog

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 13 May 2008, Ernest Cline wrote:
> >
> >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.
> 
> Is there any reasonable chance an element for a dialog box might end up 
> being added to XForms?  (There is a proposal mentioned on the XForms 
> wiki [1] for a possible dialog element for XForms 2.0, but I have no 
> idea how much of a chance that proposal has as opposed to extending the 
> message element.) I know that XHTML 5 + XForms isn't a major concern, 
> but I do think that avoiding a problem for those that will be using 
> various flavors of XHTML with XForms is worth addressing now.  If XForms 
> were to add an explicit dialog box element, what name other than 
> <dialog/> would be appropriate?

There are a number of other much more important conflicts between XForms 
and HTML at this point, I don't think this is a particularly big concern.


On Wed, 14 May 2008, Karl Dubost wrote:
> 
> food for thoughts
> 
> * <conversation> (probably too long)
> * <chat>      (probably too IRC, messenger oriented, though here
>                I suspect my own distortion field. People often says
>                "let's have a chat".)
> * <dialogue>  (was wondering if it was less geeky than dialog, not sure)
> * <discourse>

These have been suggested in recent threads.


> * <colloquy>

I would imagine this would confuse more people than <dialog>.


> * <speech>

This has the same problem as <talk>, which was also suggested recently.


> * <talking>
> * <converse>

These are not in the same style (nouns) as other tags, which would lead to 
a language consistency problem.


On Tue, 13 May 2008, Zachary Carter wrote:
>
> 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.

I agree that the initial name, if that's all you see, has the opportunity 
to confuse, but once you read what the element was really for, did the 
confusion continue to be a problem?

-- 
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