[whatwg] Thoughts on HTML 5 - dialog

[Zachary Carter]

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.

[1]http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XUL:dialog

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 8:08 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>
>  --
>  Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
>  http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
>  Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>



-- 
Zach Carter