[whatwg] <comment> element

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela at cs.tut.fi> wrote:
> 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?

For example, a system might aggregate a user's comments across
multiple comment-points.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/show-only-comments-by-specific-registered-user

> 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).

Human communication is never entirely context-free.

>> 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? :-)).

Certainly, but that doesn't reduce the force of those arguments one iota.

If the claim is we need to solve a user problem, and we have existing
tools/features that solve that problem, then we should ensure any
features proposed would solve it significantly better than those
existing tools/features.

>> 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?

I agree with Tab's answer.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis