Didn't mean to go off-list with this. Posting the prior exchange before I respond:
On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 7:36 PM, Hugh Guiney <hugh.gui...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Ian Hickson <i...@hixie.ch> wrote: >> Because it was invented before <article>, so consumers apply it to the >> whole document and don't know about <article>. In other words, backwards >> compatibility. > > But if a consumer uses <article>, doesn't that take them out of the > backwards-compat category? > > Also, as I pointed out in the original post, consumers already use > rel=tag intending for it to apply only to portions of a page. On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 9:51 PM, Ian Hickson <i...@hixie.ch> wrote: > On Fri, 14 Sep 2012, Hugh Guiney wrote: >> On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Ian Hickson <i...@hixie.ch> wrote: >> > Because it was invented before <article>, so consumers apply it to the >> > whole document and don't know about <article>. In other words, >> > backwards compatibility. >> >> But if a consumer uses <article>, doesn't that take them out of the >> backwards-compat category? > > How so? I mean, Google will work the same (for example) regardless of > whether Googlebot supports <article> or not. > > >> Also, as I pointed out in the original post, consumers already use >> rel=tag intending for it to apply only to portions of a page. > > Consumers or producers? What matters here is not changing _consumer_ > behaviour, so that we don't break pages written with the assumption that > they work as they do now.