This is surely a situation where tables (for once) provide cleaner and easier to read markup.

Unfortunately a table has no semantic meaning to it, and dialog in itself is not tabular data.

I think as has been mentioned earlier seems to be the way forward. But then seeing the HTML 4.01 spec, I think this makes more sense. As a majority of the document is quoted, The key here is that the character is speaking and the their quote is tied directly to them.

I struggled with this a while back in a blog posting I had to convert for someone, there was plenty of dialog, and I must admit I scratched my head a few times.

It looks like this may be an option:

<div id="act4">
<dl class="dialog">
    <dt class="speaker">Rick</dt>
    <dd class="rick"><q>Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship</q></dd>
</dl>
<p class="directions">The two walk off together into the night.</p> 
<p class="directions">FADE OUT.</p> 
<p class="directions">THE END</p>
</div>

I presume if there was a stream of dialog it would stay within on

block, until a direction would break that stream of dialog.

I think if the HTML 4.01 specs saw usage for this within the specifications, the next best step would be to add semantic class meanings and possibly come up with a sensible stylesheet. Nuances such as id’s for acts and the ability to highlight speakers would be possible if all the actual quoted dialog had a class name similar to the cited character.

I think there are subtleties here that could make it semantically useful and through css offer flexibility on how the script is interpreted when rendered.

In Alex’s original suggestion there are several peices of repeated markup that seem to me to be fixes problems that would be naturally solved by using table markup. Having the speakers name repeated twice in the markup seems like a hack, and would make for harder to maintain/write code - this would not be needed using a table. Also having to declare the purpose of each peice of information every time something is said seems similarly like code bloat - use a table and you only have to declare what each type of information is once (in the column header).

This is surely a situation where tables (for once) provide cleaner and easier to read markup.

<table>
<tr>
<th>Speaker</th><th>Dialog</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Name</td><td> Lorem ipsum</td>
</tr>

…

</table>

The data I was trying to mark up the other day was an Organisational chart.

…

Any ideas?

That’s a curly one, but I’ll have a think about that. I’d like to do a series of these so I’ll post it if I can.

Something Like:

< div class="act" >< h1 >Act 1< /h1 >
   < div class="scene" >< h2 >Outside< /h2 >
      < div class="character" >Cynthia
         < p >Hi, thanks for coming out today. My name's Cynthia.</p>
     </div>
   </div>
</div >

 
<act>Act 1</act>
<scene>Outside</scene>
<c>Cynthia</c>
Hi, thanks for coming out today. My name's Cynthia.</code>

Then I’ve got some mediawiki plugins that translate it to:

 
<div class="act">Act 1</div>
<div class="scene">Outside</div>
<div class="character">Cynthia</div>
<p>Hi, thanks for coming out today. My name's Cynthia.</p>

<blockquote class=”rick”><cite class=”speaker”>Rick</cite>

That is, if the text of the <cite> is always equivalent to the class of the <blockquote>, then you’re duplicating data. I understand why you’re doing it, I’m just playing Devil’s Semantic Advocate.

To do any sort of interesting formatting without the class would require either a CSS parent combinator (which doesn’t exist) or switching to a sibling-based structure, such as a <dl> (which is suboptimal).

When was that relaxation recommendation made, Tommy? I hadn’t read anything along those lines.

It’s in the spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/lists.html#edef-DL
I can’t say for sure when that paragraph was added, but it was long ago.

Your concerns about Google’s DEFINE function is probably well-founded, though. That’s the risk you take when you change the semantics of existing element types (something I recently wrote about on my blog, BTW).