Conversational interfaces

Psst… Jeremy! Right now you’re getting notified every time something is posted to Slack. That’s great at first, but now that activity is increasing you’ll probably prefer dialing that down.

What’s happening?

Why does everyone always look at me? I know I’m a chalkboard and that’s my job, I just wish people would ask before staring at me. Sometimes I don’t have anything to say.

I’m Little MOO - the bit of software that will be managing your order with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done and on it’s way to you.

It looks like you’re writing a letter.

Your quest is to find the Warlock’s treasure, hidden deep within a dungeon populated with a multitude of terrifying monsters. You will need courage, determination and a fair amount of luck if you are to survive all the traps and battles, and reach your goal — the innermost chambers of the Warlock’s domain.

Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?

I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.

ÆLFRED MECH HET GEWYRCAN

Ælfred ordered me to be made

Technical note

I have marked up the protagonist of each conversation using the cite element. There is a long-running dispute over the use of this element. In HTML 4.01 it was perfectly fine to use cite to mark up a person being quoted. In the HTML Living Standard, usage has been narrowed:

The cite element represents the title of a work (e.g. a book, a paper, an essay, a poem, a score, a song, a script, a film, a TV show, a game, a sculpture, a painting, a theatre production, a play, an opera, a musical, an exhibition, a legal case report, a computer program, etc). This can be a work that is being quoted or referenced in detail (i.e. a citation), or it can just be a work that is mentioned in passing.

A person’s name is not the title of a work — even if people call that person a piece of work — and the element must therefore not be used to mark up people’s names.

I disagree.

In the examples above, it’s pretty clear that I, Pencil and Warlock Of Firetop Mountain are valid use cases for the cite element according to the HTML5 definition; they are titles of works. But what about Clippy or Little Moo or Slackbot? They’re not people …but they’re not exactly titles of works either.

If I were to mark up a dialogue between Eliza and a human being, should I only mark up Eliza’s remarks with cite? In text transcripts of conversations with Alexa, Siri, or Cortana, should only their side of the conversation get attributed as a source? Or should they also be written without the cite element because it must not be used to mark up people’s names …even though they are not people, according to conventional definition.

It’s downright botist.

My chatbot is dead · Why yours should probably be too · Adrian Z

The upside to being a terrible procrastinator is that certain items on my to-do list, like, say, “build a chatbot”, will—given enough time—literally take care of themselves.

I ultimately feel like it has slowly turned into a fad. I got fooled by the trend, and as a by-product became part of the trend itself.

Tabs in HTML?

I’ve been having some really interesting chats with Brian about tabs, markup, progressive enhancement and accessibility. Here’s a braindump of his current thinking which is well worth perusing.

I Wanted To Type a Number | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

Choosing the right input type for your form field.

New Mobile Safari stuff in iOS5: position:fixed, overflow:scroll, new input type support, web workers, ECMAScript 5 | David B. Calhoun – Developer Blog

A look at some of the new HTML5/JavaScript additions coming in the next version of Mobile Safari.

Bulletproof HTML5 <details> fallback using jQuery · Mathias Bynens

A good example of the correct way to approach new interactive elements in HTML5 (the details element in this case): test for native support and then emulate with JavaScript if required.