[whatwg] article: do we really need this?

[fantasai]

Elliotte Harold wrote:
> 
> Not much. <section class="article"> is perfectly fine. My mind just 
> happened to be in another spec at the moment where there were roles and 
> not classes, so I happened to mention role where I probanly should have 
> said class.

IMHO, predefined classes do not belong in HTML5. The class attribute is
already defined as user-defined, and it should remain that way to avoid
conflicts.

> 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.

<address> is a poorly understood, rarely-used element because it's
poorly-named. It represents the intersection of <contactinfo> and
<attribution>, which is neither particularly useful nor particularly
related to its name.

> I suspect I could ask the same question of a few other elements as well. 
> time and meter come to mind. They at least don't have any obvious 
> equivalents already in the spec, and are obvious enough they perhaps 
> won't be frequently misused; but do authors actually need these? Will 
> they use them?

The meter concept is widely used already (think reviews and ratings).
As long as <meter> provides the necessary stylistic flexibility, it
should be a useful addition to HTML5. If it doesn't, though, or if it
makes styling more difficult than current methods, then it won't be
used much.

Dates are very often marked-up specially.[1] There's even a microformat
design pattern developed to embed ISO representations of the date
without compromising its readability:
   http://microformats.org/wiki/datetime-design-pattern
The <time> element is much more appropriate for this than <abbr>.

[1] http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/classes.html

~fantasai