[whatwg] article: do we really need this?

[Elliotte Harold]

Has there been any extensive discussion of the article element in Web 
Apps 1.0? It is currently described as:

"represents a section of a page that consists of a composition that 
forms an independent part of a document, page, or site. This could be a 
forum post, a magazine or newspaper article, a Web log entry, a 
user-submitted comment, or any other independent item of content."

It seems sort of wishy washy. Most of the time what I think of as an 
"article" is a separate page with its own URL. This use case seems to be 
handled better by section, perhaps with a role attribute. Maybe a 
section is less independent than an article, but that's going to be a 
very fuzzy distinction, and really hard to explain, teach, and validate.

Is there some obvious use case for this element? Mostly to me it just 
seems to needlessly clutter the spec, especially  once you consider how 
it relates to potential sibling sections. I think I'd prefer to just 
drop it and stick with section.

Anyone else feel the same or am I crying in the wilderness again? :-)

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
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