Proposal: <content> element

Looking back at the Web Authoring Statistics

  http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/classes.html

I think the classes that indicated the need for an <article> in fact indicate the need for another element. Besides having a header and a footer most pages have some kind of element that indicates where the main content of the page is. I think that is what the classes "main" and "content" indicate. WAI-ARIA has a specific role for this purpose as well, "main". Presumably allowing AT to jump directly to the content of a page.

If you consider a typical blog or news site you have a header, sidebar, footer, and a content area. The content area is not a single article, but usually (on the frontpage) consists of the latest ten articles or so. It seems perfectly logical to have some kind of grouping element for these just like many pages already do.

I think that if you do the study again and also include the values of id attributes it will become even more clear, but simply studying templates of some blog engines probably does the trick too.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Monday, 17 August 2009 08:46:36 UTC