HTML markup for an interview

Question

Hello,

I am asking for an advice on what kind of markup should be used to mark up an interview type of content in HTML as a transcribed interview in a cleanest and semantically most sensible way?

Preferably I would like something that would be valid HTML5, but that is not a hard requirement.

(My initial impulse was to use <dl>, <dt> and <dd> tags, but that does not seem right for some reason)

Ps - I am just on the outlook for the good clean way to generally represent conversation type content in HTML.

Someone posted a suggestion to use <dialog> tag, but that has been banned by WHATWG and their official suggestion for replacement is to use a series of <p> tags: It seems that the <dialog> tag has been banned from HTML5 and no sensible replacement has been proposed. The spec itself says that one should mark up the conversation as a series of p tags: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/links.html#conversations

Answer 1

I'd use dl or (p and abbr) combination.

Here, on SO markup like this:

<p><abbr title="Anakin Skywalker">AS</abbr>: 
   Master Norris, do you really parse HTML with regex?</p>
<p><abbr title="Chuck Norris">CN</abbr>: 
   Not anymore… I have already parsed it all.</p>

becomes:

---

AS: Master Norris, do you really parse HTML with regex?

CN: Not anymore… I have already parsed it all.

---

The CSS styles are poor, but HTML without stylesheets looks good and the screen readers should do their job right.

The ideal markup

The ideal markup would allow to easily extract just:

• the questions
• or the answers

So dl like structure would be fine, or even better:

<dialogue>
   <which>AS</which>
   <what>Master Norris, do you really parse HTML with regex?</what>
   <which>AS</which>
   <what>Not anymore… I have already parsed it all.</what>
</dialogue>

Which is exactly the same structure as dl, dt and dd.

The even better:

<interview>
   <question>
       <which>AS</which>
       <what>Master Norris, do you really parse HTML with regex?</what>
   </question>
   <answer>
       <which>CN</which>
       <what>Not anymore… I have already parsed it all.</what>
   </answer>
</interview>

Unfortunately, there is no valid markup in HTML for this :)