[whatwg] <comment> element

[Jukka K. Korpela]

6.9.2011 12:40, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:

> "[S]elf-contained composition in a document, page, application, or
> site and that is, in principle, independently distributable or
> reusable, e.g. in syndication" is a concept that includes comments,
> blog posts, and news stories. So there's no contradiction in the spec
> here.

We probably understand the words "self-contained" and "independently" 
very differently then. I cannot see a typical comment as self-contained, 
as it by definition implies the context created by the document being 
commented on. So how could it be *independetly* reused and syndicated?

A typical comment might be a bit more than "Me too!" or "I especially 
like the second paragraph" or "Gruntmaster 6000 is the best!" But it's 
seldom written to be self-contained or reusable independently (if at all).

> What user problems do the existing solutions to these tasks cause?
>
> e.g. RSS/Atom feeds, hAtom, old-fashioned scraping for extraction,
> syndication of comments.
>
> e.g. class for styling.

Such arguments could be used against _any_ new markup elements (and 
almost any existing elements - do we really need much more elements than 
<a> when we can use metadata, styling, and scripting? :-)).

> Why do you think we could get enough systems to use the<comment>
> element correctly enough to support the creation of new solutions
> using the<comment>  tag instead?

That's the question I've been asking since the start of this discussion, 
and I am getting _less_ pessimistic.

> b) Since a comment is just a "self-contained composition", it can be
> marked up with<article>  whether nested inside another<article>  or
> not.

If comments are generally "self-contained compositions", what would be 
an example of a composition that is _not_ self-contained?

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/