[whatwg] Use of article to identify the main content of a web page

[Charles McCathie Nevile]

On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 19:08:05 +0100, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Mon, 19 Nov 2012, Ian Yang wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 8:01 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>> > On Thu, 15 Nov 2012, Ian Yang wrote:
>> > >
>> > > That's a good idea. We really need an element to wrap all the <p>s,
>> > > <ul>s, <ol>s, <figure>s, <table>s ... etc of a blog post.
>> >
>> > That's called <article>.
>>
>> Thanks Hickson. Actually I had turned down my own opinion (
>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2012Nov/0182.html
>> ).
>>
>> And isn't <article> used to wrap an entire blog post? Like this:
>>
>> <article>
>>     <header />
>>     <div />
>>     <footer />
>> </article>
>
> Right. It wraps all the elements of a blog post. All the <p>s, <ul>s,
> <ol>s, <figure>s, <table>s, <h1>s, <footer>s, etc.

Sure, but what about multiple articles, in a page like the front of a US  
newspaper or a forum page with multiple threads, or the front page of my  
blog (which offers the last n articles on the same page)?

> If you just want to wrap a subpart of that for rendering purposes, <div>
> is the element you want. Basically <div> is always the answer if the
> question is "how do I provide myself a hook for CSS styling".

Sure, but that isn't the question I have. I'd like to know "what is the  
main content of the page"?

There are a set of use cases that have some overlap (but not a whole lot),  
where I'd like to seperate out "articles" in the sense of "things" - like  
"things in a newsletter" or "things that people are talking about".

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
       chaals at yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com