Re: Is the current definition of the article element in HTML useful?

On Wed, 23 Jan 2013 23:02:13 +0100, Kornel Lesiński <kornel@geekhood.net>  
wrote:

> On Wed, 23 Jan 2013 13:06:29 -0000, Bruce Lawson <brucel@opera.com>  
> wrote:
>
>> Is there a reason for any semanric to describe a comment, though? does  
>> anyone benefit from
>>
>> <article>
>> <h1>My wonderful Mankini</h1>
>> There's only one letter difference between "mankini" and "mankind".
>>
>> <h2> Two comments</h2>
>>
>> <article>lol</article>
>> <article>u SUK</article>
>>
>> </article>
>>
>> over
>>
>> <article>
>> <h1>My wonderful Mankini</h1>
>> There's only one letter difference between "mankini" and "mankind".
>>
>> <h2> Two comments</h2>
>>
>> <div>lol</div>
>> <div>u SUK</div>
>>
>> </article>
>
> Goal of applications like Readability, Instapaper, Pocket and Reader  
> mode in Safari is to display content of page's main article without  
> comments or other distractions.
>
> Currently these applications use heuristics to achieve that (AFAIK  
> things like ratio of text to elements, whitelist/blacklist of class  
> names) and I presume that nested <article> could be a useful input for  
> such algorithm.

Yes. Likewise for search engines (and probably other systems that try to  
process web content), people using the article element in this way is  
actually helpful.

Skipping the use of article because screenreaders are overly verbose might  
be a short-term hack that breaks a long-term benefit, assuming that  
screenreaders will improve their handling.

We already know that they usually take a long time to do things like this  
(For example header navigation still wasn't in JAWS in 2000 as far as I  
could tell, despite having been implemented for years in other systems,  
and now being one of the most critical functions for users).

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
       chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Friday, 1 February 2013 11:39:17 UTC