[whatwg] Footer inside header

[Andrés Sanhueza]

2012/4/29 Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com>:
>
> On Apr 26, 2012, at 9:39 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 1:32 AM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
>> <bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>> On Apr 25, 2012 9:20 PM, "Andrés Sanhueza" <peroyomaslists at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I see no reason a
>>>> <footer> as in "textual metadata of a section" can't be inside a
>>>> <header> ("lead of a section"). Could this be considered to be
>>>> allowed?
>>>
>>> Do you have a real example where you think that markup would be useful?
>>>
>>> If user agents provide commands to navigate to headers and footers, nesting
>>> them could make navigation confusing.
>>
>> One was presented in another thread - according to the definition of
>> <footer>, it appears that authorship information is most appropriate
>> to put there.  But sometimes the byline is placed inside the "header"
>> area, which is reasonably marked up with a <header>.  So, it makes
>> sense to be able to nest the <footer> within the <header>.
>
> It may be useful to have distinctive markup to identify a byline within a header. But placing a <footer> element inside a <header> element does not seem like the most clear way to do that. I expect most authors would not think to use it that way, and content consumers would have a hard time distinguishing intentional cases of such use from authoring errors.
>

The problem is that I don't see semantic difference into the current
definition of <footer> and a header byline to warrant a new element or
convention. While <header> is clearly 'introductory' stuff, <footer>
is defined as meta info of its section, so its position on the code is
not fixed as long it complies with that. <header> is not a section
element so it may not cause an issue in that regard.
It have been stated that the element names aren't determinant of their
semantic, and that apply for previous redefined elements which were
originally named on presentational aspects. Their new definitions
gives them a semantic purpose, yet making them still distinct from
other elements.