[whatwg] <comment> element in HTML5 Spec?

Richard Summers Richard.Summers at bbc.co.uk
Tue Dec 14 09:41:15 PST 2010


Thanks for the feedback guys, really appreciate it.

Using <article> elements within other <article> elements feels a bit like
we'd just be replacing <div> for <article>, it seems to remove some of the
logical distinction between different types of content.

As the use-case would potentially be huge (previously stated impact to
Blogs/Message Boards/News outlets), is there any more mileage in perhaps
using a <feedback> (or similar) element, as suggested by Bruce Hyslop?

A <feedback>,or similar, (<response>?) element would distinguish content as
a response to an article, and therefore denote that it serves a different
purpose to the main content in the <article> element.

Thoughts?

Rich


On 13/12/2010 19:23, "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Richard Summers
> <Richard.Summers at bbc.co.uk> wrote:
>> Hi gang,
>> 
>> I wonder if anyone can help me...
>> 
>> I attended  great talk today by Bruce Lawson from Opera about HTML5. I was
>> wondering, is there any plan to implement a <comment> element within the
>> HTML5 spec? I¹m suggesting this as a complimentary element to the <article>
>> element.
>> 
>> I believe it could be useful as it could be used to differentiate between
>> audience generated content and article-author generated content. This could
>> enable search engines to differentiate between the 2 types of content, and
>> weigh them differently in different searches. Semantically and structurally,
>> something like this seems to make sense.
>> 
>> This would mean huge implications for all the blogs out there, and the
>> increasing number of commenting systems on News outlets.
>> 
>> Cool, let me know if this has already been covered, or if it¹s not a good
>> idea, why? :)
> 
> The idea is potentially interesting.  Right now, the correct way to
> mark up comments is to just put each in an <article> of their own (as
> each is a piece of independent content).
> 
> What benefits could be brought along by instead using <comment>?  I
> can think of a few potential benefits:
> 
> 1. Differentiating between the main article and user-generated content
> in response (you bring this up).  Would this be useful for search
> engines?  I'm not sure.  Would it be useful to weight comment content
> differently from article content?  Perhaps weight links in comments
> less than links in the rest of the page?
> 
> 2. Providing a bit more information to screen-readers that may
> navigate by headings or sections, to make it easier to skip to or over
> the comments on a post.
> 
> 3. Make the authoring pattern a bit more obvious - rather than having
> to learn that it's okay and recommended to nest <article>s like that,
> authors could just naturally gravitate towards using <article> and
> <comment> together.
> 
> One thing to note - <comment> has already been used by IE6 and earlier
> as an alternative to the <!-- --> syntax for HTML comments.  They
> apparently stopped supporting this in IE7, though (I can confirm that
> it no longer does anything special in IE8), so we probably don't have
> to worry about it.  No other browser does anything special for it, it
> seems, so the compat impact is apparently small enough to be ignored.
> 
> ~TJ


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