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

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 15 Sep 2009, Jeremy Keith wrote:
> 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.

I've tweaked their definitions (as well as a few others) to take this data 
into account.

Thanks for this research, by the way, it's very useful.


> 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>.

I'd like to rename <article>, if someone can come up with a better word 
that means "blog post, blog comment, forum post, or widget". I do think 
there is an important difference between a subpart of a page that is 
a potential candidate for syndication, and a subsection of a page that 
only makes sense with the rest of the page.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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