[whatwg] use of article to markup comments

Steve Faulkner faulkner.steve at gmail.com
Mon Jan 28 09:13:18 PST 2013


> Brucel wrote:
>
> On Sat, 26 Jan 2013 10:56:10 -0000, Steve Faulkner
> <faulkner.steve at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> > Lists are appropriate for indicating nested tree structures. The use
> > of lists to markup comments is a common mark up pattern used in
> > blogging software such as wordpress. The code verbosity is not
> > dissimilar to  the use of article, less so even option end </li> tags
> > are omitted. Besides comments are generated code not hand authored so
> > I don't see a problem with code verbosity
>
> [...]
>
> >
> >> (It makes some sense, I suppose, to think of comments as a "list", but
> >> *unordered*? If you're going to group them at all, wouldn't the order
> >> be important? Bruce Lawson (
> >> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2013Jan/0111.html)'s
> >> observation that comments are "heavily dependent on context" would seem
> >> to support the idea that it *is* important, especially since some
> >> comments are responses to others.)
> >
> > agreed it would be better to use order lists.
> >
>
>   Wordpress blogs, for example, have comments like
>
> "Bob Smith said at <a href="#permalink">9.55 on 31 Febtember</a>: LOL"
>
> Thus, every comment has a link that a UA can use to jump from comment to
> comment. The order is implied via the timestamp. So what's wrong with
>
> <article>
> <h1>Witty blogpost</h1>
> <p>lorem ipsum
>
> <section>
> <h2>35 erudite and well-reasoned comments</h2>
> <div>Bob Smith said at <a href="#permalink1">9.55 on 31 Febtember</a>: Can
> I use DRM in Polyglot documents?</div>
> <div>Hixie said at <a href="#permalink2">9.57 on 1 June</a>: What's your
> use case?</div>
> ...
> </section>
>
> </article>
>
> In short, why should the spec suggest any specific method of marking up
> comments?

Good question, in the case of <article> recommended tomarkup comments
it seems like it's an element in search of a use case.

For users who consume article semantics it appear to cause issues when
used for any piece of content ranging from a one sentence comment to
an article containing thousands of words or an interactive widget.


regards
SteveF



More information about the whatwg mailing list