The work began back in the dark ages, around 2000. Many people believed that people who were likely to use semantics worth believing were more likely to have markup quality that could be relied on as an indicator. It seems that such superstitions have been banished along with XHTML2, a preference for politeness in what were then called “the professions”, and other such relics.

It does seem that conversation is a common idiom in many documents (you know, books, comics, and such), and while HTML 5 might be moving from its origins in a way to mark up text there could yet be some value in retaining or improving its capacity to do so.

We shall see how things pan out.

I don’t necessarily think that a dialog tag and dt/dd are the best way to do it. I kind of felt dialog/dt/dd was picked for presentation, not semantics — the default styling lends itself well to dialog. But that should be the least consideration. The only other reason might be that dt/dd encapsulate a name and a statement well. But that has nothing to do with semantics either.

I’m also not 100% sure about inventing other new tags as children for a dialog tag either, though I’d personally be willing to entertain ideas. If a common format could be agreed upon that didn’t seem to have any egregious blind spots (like cite has), I think the spec and HTML semantics would be improved.

Which reminds of the reasons I thought XHTML was going to be the bomb. The core elements should be semantic but generic because to have truly semantic HTML would require a huge library of tags, many of whom have very limited use cases. The extensible part…but that’s water under the bridge, isn’t it?

I did not realize dialog and cite were such a sensitive issues until last night/this morning. I’ve been reading through the HTML5 spec and periodically running up against things that seem counter-intuitive to me.

Small things, really, that I think could be easily fixed. So I made a resolution to blog about each of them (often by writing I clarify matters to myself). While I was writing I was googling for other stuff on the subject and came up with a lot of links, including some hilarious discussions in mailing lists.

It makes me a bit nervous, because I frankly can’t see any reasonable basis for the argument that titles should be the only valid content of the cite tag, but I didn’t intially realize that I was treading on sacred ground.

I think we need to break this stuff down into its constituent parts before we charge headlong into solutions. But I’m not a person who deals well with conversations of the tone I’ve seen in the mailing lists. So you won’t see me on there either; I lack the courage.

Using the cite element to refer to speakers (not just “works”) has been accepted good semantic (X)HTML practice since at least early 2005. E.g. from one of my presentations:
http://tantek.com/presentations/2005/03/elementsofxhtml/#slide10

Since that time, numerous web designers/developers have used the HTML4 cite element in this way, and thus it makes sense to keep it.

The best approach to encourage this change in HTML5 is perhaps two-fold:

1. Find and document more uses of the cite element to refer to speakers.
2. Document your opinion.

I’ve create a wiki page on the WHATWG wiki to handle both of these, please take a look and add your real world use links and opinions accordingly:

http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Cite_element

Thanks,

Tantek

That said, good luck getting the WG to allow <cite> in any context that doesn’t fit with “title of work.” The arguments against expanding its usefulness have gotten increasingly absurd, which suggests they’re beyond listening to reason.