[whatwg] New <social> element (was: Various threads with feedback on HTML elements)

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 22 Oct 2013, Bruno Racineux wrote:
> 
> <article> is fine for a comment as syndicate-able and self-contained. 
> Even a LOL comment. People often publish full "articles" that are far 
> less useful or intelligible comment that a LOL. I just wish it was <art>.

It's probably too late to change the name now.


> I however propose a <social> element, to encompass the semantic of 
> social interaction around the context of the main article, which could 
> be tweets, comments, discussions, reviews, testimonials, forum feeds, 
> rating etc.

What would _not_ be social? Isn't pretty much every Web page by definition 
a social interaction, since it was caused to be produced by one human, and 
was produced so as to cause some impact on another human?


> What we need is not marking up individual comments differently, but a 
> semantic on the whole block.
> 
> Consider the case of someone using a screen-reader wanting to jump to 
> comments. The only way to do that right now, is to hope that a comment 
> link is around. But because there are no standards in terms of where 
> that would be he/she has to skip through links. I would think that 
> jumping to comments right away is potentially a slightly painful thing 
> to do atm. And there are no landmark roles for that either that I know 
> of.

An AT can provide a "jump to comments" feature quite easily -- the first 
comment is the first nested <article>, and all other comments come after 
it (since if one came before it, by definition, it wouldn't be first).


> Comments don't seem to quite fit as an <aside> or <section>

Why would they not fit in <section>? They're in the comments section.

-- 
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