[whatwg] <comment> element

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 9:55 AM, Shaun Moss <shaun at astromultimedia.com> wrote:
> Please explain to me how it makes sense for a comment to stand on its own.

Works just as well as all those blog posts that are just commentary on
something someone else has written. (And which often are syndicated as
comments via pingback.)

>> To an HTML author, especially a newbie, an article *is* a newspaper article,
> and this is entirely distinct from a user-submitted comment related to the
> article. Semantics isn't just for robots, it's for humans, too - a fact that
> seems to be frequently overlooked.

This seems a rather Anglophone-centric argument. In any case, it turns
out to be very hard to come up with concise names that are
unambiguous. For example, <cite> has often been misunderstand as
intended to wrap a quotation rather than a source or title.

That it is hard to name things unambiguously is not necessarily a good
reason to introduce more names.

> This may come as a surprise, but 99.9% of HTML authors don't read specs.

When it comes what to what markup blogs and CMSes should churn out to
structure the page, this hardly matters. The 99.9% will be generating
content via WYSIWYG editors, and the results of their labors will be
dumped into the relevant HTML5 structural elements, as generated by
code produced by the much smaller segment of authors with marginally
better spec awareness.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis