Le 31 oct. 2006 à 16:26, Henri Sivonen a écrit :
I know it has already been discussed, but I'd suggest this:
<dialog>
What benefits do consumers of HTML get from knowing that something
is a dialog?
What tangible benefits can authors see from marking up dialogs as
dialogs? That is, what is the incentive to bother?
If most authors are not incentivized to mark up their dialogs as
such, is there still enough value for consumers of markup if only
relatively few dialogs are marked up as dialogs?
Those are legitimate questions.
People have asked how to markup dialogs for a long time, but many are
reluctant to use <dl> because it is named "definition list" and a
dialog has absolutely nothing to do with a definition list (basically
a dialog does not define anything, and it isn't a list more than a
couple of adjacent paragraphs form a list).
Well, if it comes that <dl> can be used for dialogs, fine. But I
believe that introducing a <dialog> element will makes things
clearer, as HTML4 has explicitly proposed the use of <dl> for dialogs
and many people still find that dumb.
Is there a value in knowing something is a dialog? Not always, that's
certain. But in certain contexts it is important for styling as
there's no punctuation to tell what is a dialog and what is not.
That's when <dl> was used.
Why not just use punctuation for the quotations?
Indeed. I rarely use <q> myself. But I know other people who do. Why
is there a <q> element in the first place? Sometimes I wonder.
Picking up a different voice in screen readers could be one reason.
But now that I reread the spec, <q> is possibly inappropriate for
dialogs: "The <q> element represents a part of a paragraph quoted
from another source". Does fictional dialog speech qualifies for a
quote from another source? I don't know. So maybe I should have used
quotes characters instead of <q>.
And, for the same reasons, I'm not sure anymore that <cite> is
appropriate in a dialog. Maybe it could be said that <cite> has a
special meaning inside a <dialog> element.
If printed text in French (and other languages) works with the
dialog dash style
without visual hints where you put the <q> and </q> tags, why would
an author
want to go though the trouble of tagging the dialog like that and
then making sure
that any styling on the <q> element is suppressed?
As Øistein suggested, text could be italicised (as some newspapers
do), or as I suggested above it could be used to speak the text in
another voice (which could be useful even in a novel). The <q>
element may be inappropriate for dialogs however, both semantically
(refers to another source?) and visually (automatically-inserted
quotation marks). And thus these were my two points:
1. there is no way to distinguish quoted text in a quotation from
unquoted
material inserted within the quotation marks;
2. there is no way to identify a dialog, and to identify inside a
dialog what
is spoken text and what comes from the narrator (I made some
mockups
using <q> inside <dialog> in my first post, but my conclusion is
that
<q> doesn't seem appropriate for this, because of the quotes and
possibly
because of the semantics of <q>).
I'm not sure yet what could be proposed for this, but it'd be nice if
a similar markup can be used for quotations and other spoken text.
(And it'd be nice if such markup can work in Internet Explorer
without ugly hacks. [1])
[1]: http://alistapart.com/articles/qtag
<dialog>
<p><cite>Mary:</cite> So where do you want to go tomorrow? I
can tell
you already have something in mind.</p>
<p><cite>Mark:</cite> What makes you think that?</p>
</dialog>
Why is that better than <dl>?
And why is <dl> better than that?
If you don't care about semantics, they're probably equivalent: both
have decent default styles. If you care about semantics, using <dl>
for dialog removes every bit of meaning left in <dl> as "an unordered
list of associations".
Michel Fortin
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.michelf.com/
