[whatwg] <comment> element in HTML5 Spec?

Thu Apr 28 18:00:26 PDT 2011

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 5:32 PM, Jonas Sicking <jonas at sicking.cc> wrote:
> 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.

I agree.  In particular, I want to sometimes nest articles without one
article being a comment on the outer one.

The <body> element is supposed to be the "default article" for the
page, too - it would be odd if <article>-in-<body> acted differently
from <article>-in-<article>.

~TJ