[whatwg] <comment> element

[Bjartur Thorlacius]

A far greater problem is the lack of standardization of a protocol for 
comment submittal. If the IETF were to standardize such a protocol, 
would it not make more sense to distribute comments via the same channel?
That seems like a cleaner long-term solution than changing every stream 
format out there to enable in-band comment transfer. Classes are a good 
enough interim solution.

Þann þri  6.sep 2011 19:28, skrifaði Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis:
> On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 8:02 PM, Jukka K. Korpela<jkorpela at cs.tut.fi>  wrote:
>> Self-containedness is relative. But this does not mean it is empty concept.
>> And if it were, why use it at all? Surely there is a difference between,
>> say, a blog entry or a newspaper article carefully crafted to stand on its
>> own, so that you can read it as such and take a position on it, and a
>> typical blog comment or a comment in an online news system where nobody
>> expects your comments to be in any way understandable outside the context.
>
> One can draw all sorts of distinctions; not all of them need to be
> expressed in markup.
>
 From the definition of the article element:
 > The article element represents a self-contained composition in a
 > document, page, application, or site and that is, in principle,
 > independently distributable or reusable, e.g. in syndication.

By your logic that everything should be considered self-contained, as 
nothing is truly self-contained, anything could be marked up with the 
article element, rendering the element meaningless.
>>>> 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 use <a> when you have onclick and a settable document.location? :)