[whatwg] <comment> and <ad> elements

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 7:14 AM, Shaun Moss <shaun at astromultimedia.com> wrote:
> I've joined this list to put forward the argument that there should be
> elements for <comment> and <ad> included in the HTML5 spec.
>
> These are both extremely common features of many web pages; I would say at
> least as common as "article". At present there is no obvious semantic
> element for comments and ads. To use <article>, <section> or <aside> is a
> kludge at best.

As Jukka mentions, commonness is a poor argument for introducing new
markup features.

I encourage you to consult:

http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_there_a_process_for_adding_new_features_to_a_specification.3F

in order to help you determine whether there's really a problem here
we should consider trying to solve, and to make a better proposal if
there is.

In passing, I'd say legacy treatment of <comment> (hiding it) is a
sound argument against redefining that feature to mean content a user
actually wants to see.

In the absence of sound use cases to be solved, I'd suggest addressing
your desire to markup comments and ads with @class. Or, if your hope
is that somebody might use the information somehow, you use a
vocabulary expressed using microformats, microdata, or RDFa.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis