[whatwg] article: do we really need this?

[Adrian Sutton]

> It's not really a question of whether article makes sense. The question
> is whether it makes *enough* sense. There are arguments for it, but
> they're very weak. I do not see a community crying out for this. I
> don't
> think it's going to help anybody all that much, and I'm afraid it's
> going to end up like address: a poorly understood, rarely used element
> that's misused more often than it's used properly.

One way this could be used quite powerfully is for inline editing. This would only work if there were a globally unique ID for the article included (an URL to that specific article would make most sense). It would then be fairly trivial to provide an edit mechanism (via JavaScript or built into the user-agent) that opened an editor specifically for that article and could send it back to the server with the appropriate unique ID so the server knew which article to update.

Such behaviour is already present in a lot of scenarios - blogs tend to provide an Edit link for users with edit permissions for specific posts or comments, wikis do similar things and more and more CMS systems are investigating or adding in-place editing.

It's possible to use the section element for this but its description doesn't seem as well suited - it focuses more on specific areas of the rendered page rather than different sources of content that have been combined.

> Elliotte Rusty Harold

Regards,

Adrian Sutton.