[whatwg] article/section/details naming/definition problems

[Jeremy Keith]

Henri wrote:
> http://adactio.com/journal/1607/

Ah, you beat me to it. I was just about to write an email to the list,  
honestly. ;-)

So anyway, the upshot of my somewhat unscientific survey[1] conducted  
at a workshop a couple of weeks ago is that there is great confusion  
between the <section> and <article> elements.

In that blog post, I point out that <section> and <article> were once  
more divergent but have converged over time (since the @cite and  
@pubdate attributes were dropped from <article>).

I've also seen a lot of confusion from authors wondering when to use  
<section> and when to use <article>. Bruce wrote an article on HTML5  
doctor recently to address this:
http://html5doctor.com/the-section-element/

Probably the best tutorial I've seen on this issue is from Ted:
http://edward.oconnor.cx/2009/09/using-the-html5-sectioning-elements

...but even so, the confusion remains. The very fact that tutorials  
are required for what should be intuitive structural elements is  
worrying — I don't see the same issues around <nav>, <header> or  
<footer> (now that the content model has been changed) ...although  
there is continuing confusion around <aside>.

Anyway...

Is there a strong enough case for having two separate new elements or  
they close enough in functionality that one of them could be dropped?

Personally, I don't have a strong opinion about which element name  
should be dropped, but I do think that dropping one of them would make  
life easier for authors.

Thoughts?


[1] Details of the exercise: http://adactio.com/journal/1605/

-- 
Jeremy Keith

a d a c t i o

http://adactio.com/