[html5] <article> for ecommerce product?

[Jukka K. Korpela]

20.07.2011 15:01, Dominic Morgan wrote:

> This is where I start to have issues with the spec. Are the contents of
> an <article> tag supposed to make sense out of context or not?

The contents of <article> element is supposed to make sense out of 
context, and this is an essential part of the meaning. At least this my 
understanding of the prose. The <article> element is effectively 
<syndicatable>, but that's too long a word. I guess.

 > To me a
> "user-submitted comment" is not a "self-contained composition".

It usually isn't. This is where things get too wild, perhaps. A blog 
post (by a blogger) is expected to be self-contained, syndicatable. But 
comments might me just "Me too!" or "You got it wrong in paragraph two, 
because...", which surely aren't standalone.

I think <article> elements should be nested only in rare cases, where 
the inner elements are self-contained too. Sometimes a blog comment is 
syndicatable, perhaps more valuable than the original post. But blindly 
marking up all comments as <article>, as the current version suggests 
more or less, goes far too far.

 > Outside
> the context of the original post it often makes little or no sense at
> all. The clarification about nesting goes some way to addressing this
> but not far.

Now that you say it, it looks rather evident. The question remains which 
markup should be used for blog comments. By answer is to use <div> at 
present. It is better to be semantically empty than semantically all 
wrong. What would happen if a syndication harvester got zillions of 
"article elements" containing just "Me too!"?

Alternatively, the spec could say that an article element inside an 
article element is not necessarily (or usually, to be honest) 
self-contained and syndicatable. The question then arises: What _is_ it?

 > I suspect that
> the reason blog and news posts are used as examples is that they fit
> more intuitively with the name of the tag rather than that the scope of
> the element is limited to them.

Quite possible; a blog post is an "easy" case, too. But examples should 
really help to understand the meaning better, not state the obvious. A 
difficult task indeed; it is more difficult to present good examples (or 
to set a good example) than to present good theories (or rules).

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/