W3C home > Mailing lists > Public > public-html@w3.org > August 2009

Re: Proposal: <content> element

From: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:29:43 +0200
Message-ID: <4A897767.3090507@lachy.id.au>
To: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>
Cc: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> 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'm not sure why <div> isn't sufficient for this, and it's what I've 
recommended for people to use when I've been asked about this.  The main 
content of a section should just be considered to be whatever content 
follows its header.

But in this case, to help prevent the misuse of other elements like 
<section> and <article> for this purpose, which people seem tempted to 
do, it might be better to meet authors expectations on this and provide 
an explicit element for it.

But I agree with gsnedders about how we should do this, if we do it at 
all.  We should allow one content element per section, so a typical 
section could look like this:

<section> (or other sectioning element)
   <header/>
   <content/>
   <footer/>
</section>

And the main content could be considered to be the first content element 
that is a descendant of the body element (not necessarily a child of 
body), but which isn't a descendant of another sectioning element, if 
there is one, or otherwise simply the content after the body's header.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt - Opera Software
http://lachy.id.au/
http://www.opera.com/
Received on Monday, 17 August 2009 15:30:24 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Saturday, 9 October 2021 18:44:54 UTC