[whatwg] use of article to markup comments

[Gordon P. Hemsley]

List elements and sectioning elements both represent hierarchical
relationships. They differ in how they emphasize that relationship:
lists emphasize the hierarchy outside the content, while sectioning
emphasizes the hierarchy within the content.

If the question is specifically about how to mark up comments on a
blog post or something, there's no reason you can't combine the two
methods: Each comment is a self-contained <article>, with
relationships between comments represented by <ol>.

One example:
http://jsbin.com/edewoy/1

That example presumes you consider blog post comments (or replies to
comments) as a section within the content that is being commented on
(or replied to). You could also modify the markup to have two
<article>s (one for the blog post and one for the comments) packaged
within a single parent <article>, but the principle is the same.

Note that the key here is that there is no restriction on combining
lists and sectioning elements, and thereby no need to modify the
semantics of <ol> or <ul> (as proposed in [2] in the root message).

Gordon

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Steve Faulkner
<faulkner.steve at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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



-- 
Gordon P. Hemsley
me at gphemsley.org
http://gphemsley.org/ • http://gphemsley.org/blog/