[whatwg] <comment> element in HTML5 Spec?

[Jonas Sicking]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Dec 2010, Richard Summers wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> There already is one: <article>! We defined it such that if you nest them,
> the nested ones are defined to be comments. There are some examples of
> this in the spec.
>
>
> On Mon, 13 Dec 2010, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>>
>> 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?
>
> This is already possible: a nested <article> has this semantic.

This seems like a very unintuitive solution. If this really is a use
case that is worth addressing, I think it would be worth coming up
with a dedicated element. In general, elements that have different
meaning depending on in which context they appear usually doesn't feel
very intuitive and thus likely something that people will miss or get
wrong.

/ Jonas