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HTML4 explicitly mentioned that definition lists could be used for marking up dialogue: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/lists.html#h-10.3 To ease migration to HTML5 consider allowing this technique again and remove section 4.13.3 about conversations (http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#conversations) from the specification.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: Dialogue doesn't make sense given the semantics of <dl>. HTML4 was just internally inconsistent.
This change from HTML 4.01 will only make it more difficult for authors to migrate to HTML5 and I don't see any benefits. It is also possible that removing the new recommendation for how to markup dialogue could help decrease the size of the HTML5 specification.
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/141