4.9.2011 23:27, Odin wrote:
We already have a comment tag. It's listed in the article-element
section of the spec. Article within article is suggested to be a
comment:
Suggested, not defined.
When article elements are nested, the inner article elements represent
articles that are in principle related to the contents of the outer article.
That's the definition of the meaning of nesting article elements: "in
principle related to".
For instance, a blog entry on a site that accepts user-submitted
comments could represent the comments as article elements nested
within the article element for the blog entry.
That's an example. "Could represent".
If we assume that authors use elements as per the spec as currently
worded, you _cannot_ decide that an article inside an article is a
comment. Just as it might be. It could be anything "in principle related
to" the contents of the outer article.
Besides, while many principal entries in a blog are relatively
self-contained and might be suitable for syndication, I don't think most
blog _comments_ share that property. A comment is _typically_ strongly
dependent on the context and seldom suitable for syndication. So making
authors and systems use <article> for blog comments would be bad for the
very idea of <article>.
If we think that comments need markup of their own, then I guess
<comment> would be OK, on the grounds already presented, and the natural
way to create useful semantic associations would be to allow (and
recommend) <comment> elements to have an attribute, say for=..., that
refers (by id) to the element that it comments on - maybe with the added
semantics that if the referred element is a link (<a href>), then the
comment is about the linked resource, not the link as such.
This would make it possible to marku up some content as a comment to
some _external_ document too, such as a different page in the same
system, in a discussion forum view where each entry is displayed as a
separate HTML document, just linked to others in the thread.
And in the rare cases where a comment constitutes syndicatable content,
it could of course contain an <article> element.
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
