Tami Weiss

Hello,

I am a web designer and sometimes developer in the Milwaukee area. I created beautiful, standards compliant webpages that are not only usable, but deliciously delightful. Check out my portfolio.

• Dialog tag, you will be missed

  March 21st, 2010

  One of the most disappointing things of HTML5 came and went before I even knew it existed. It was the removal of the “dialog” tag from HTML5′s working spec that had me learn of its existence, and sadly, subsequent removal.

  I have preached the importance of semantic HTML to anyone who would listen, which is why HTML5 is so darn exciting. I’ve been playing with it on some personal sites to familiarize myself with it, and will be going to “An Event Apart” to really grab that bull by its horns. Dialog seems like such a natural progression since so much of the web now includes conversations about the content in question.

  When I heard about the dialog tag being removed, I was disappointed that such a smart tag was removed. It was a nice way of saying “this is a conversation about the content” rather than limiting it to it all being the same weight as the content. It would allow search engines to know that the content in those tags didn’t necessarily generate from the site author, and that it is probably meta to the main content. And on sites that were just discussions, it would be a good indicator of the kind of site you were looking at based on the type of content.

  After all, isn’t that what we’re trying to do with the semantic web?

  Sadly, the recommendation is to re-purpose the dl (definition list) tag. I don’t like it one bit. The suggestion implies to me that a definition list isn’t a useful enough feature on its own. While so many people don’t seem to know about it, I disagree with its usefulness as it currently stands. I’ve used it on almost every site I’ve built in the past few years, as do most designers/developers I’ve shown. It’s just a matter of lack of publicity not how useful it is.

  I only hope that before the spec is complete that WHATWG reconsiders such a potentially valuable tag.
  And if not, well, so long Dialog tag, I wish I had known you better.

  | Tags: dialog, html5, semantic, WHATWG
  Posted In: Coding and Markup | No Comments »