> What would be wrong with doing something like this? > > <h3>Comment Title</h3> > <p> > Posted by foobar on foobar > </p> > <div> > <p> > Comment text > </p> > </div>
Nothing 'wrong', as such. The <div> surrounding the 'comment text' paragraph is superfluous and could be dropped, but semantically it's pretty sound. The semantic question to ask there: "is each individual comment really a subsection of the page?" (which a header signifies). The answer could be yes or no there, I err on "no" but I see how people could differ. If you were to mark up three comments using your above example, you have 3 different sub-sections in your page structure. Ultimately, the reason for preferring a definition list is that the spec says you can use it to structure a dialogue and since that's what comments are, it does rather make sense. Using a definition list describes everything you've achieved with <p> and <h3>, but /also/ makes it very clear that the comments are a related sequence. Arguably a <dl> also describes a much closer relationship between the comment title (<h3> --> <dt>) and the information (date , author and comment text (all <dd>)), than a heading and following paragraphs. There's not much in it really, and there comes a point when choosing one highly-optimised semantic structure over another highly-optimised semantic structure shouldn't matter. Both are pretty good. Ben ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
