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The HTML5 <article> element seems potentially very useful, but there seems to me to be an aspect of the overall design that makes it work not quite as well as it might. I'm guessing that HTML5 is designed to support the scenario where an author creates create potentially reusable chunks of HTML5 content, which are then assembled by the publishing system into valid HTML5 documents, where these reusable chunks would typically use <article> or <section> as their root element. The problem with the current design seems to me to occur when you want such a chunk to be the entire content of a page. I don't see any way to get the "right" outline without modifying the reusable chunk. If I simply wrap the <article> in a <body> in the obvious way: <html> <head>...</head> <body> <article> <h1>Article title</h1> ... </article> </body> </html> then I get an outline, according to [1], where the <body> node is a section with an implied heading containing a single section with a "Article title" heading, whereas I would want to get the same outline as: <html> <head>...</head> <body> <h1>Article title</h1> ... </body> </html> One way round this might be a "nosection" boolean attribute on <body>, which would say to the outline algorithm not to create a section for the <body> element, and which would be valid only when the <body> element consists of a single sectioning content element. [1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#outlines
see also the following reply posted to the comments list: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-comments/2010Nov/0003.html quoting Gannon Dick: [[ Wouldn't it make more sense to put a "nosection" boolean attribute on the <html> instead of <body> ... the meaning would be no metadata except for <title> and <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="foo" /> The reductio ad absurdum HTML document (stripped of <article> fragments) would then be truly empty. ]]
(In reply to comment #1) > [[ > Wouldn't it make more sense to put a "nosection" boolean attribute on the > <html> instead of <body> ... the meaning would be no metadata except for > <title> and <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="foo" /> > > The reductio ad absurdum HTML document (stripped of <article> fragments) would > then be truly empty. > ]] Making the section computation depend on attributes seems scary from a performance point of view in case a selector that matches on outline depth is introduced.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: The <article> or <section> shouldn't be part of the reused chunk, it should be added as part of the process that merges the reusable chunks.
In the context of XHTML, it's important that the reused chunk be a well-formed XML document (so that, for example, I can edit with a schema-aware XML-editing tool) which means it requires a root element.
Sure the root element should be the root element of whatever format it is you are using that can embed HTML fragments (e.g. <fragment xmlns="http://example.com/my-syndication-storage-format">), or if you're using pure HTML, it would be the required <html>/<body> pair. The point is just that when you take the content from this document to the syndicated document, you only take the contents of the fragment, not the fragment's container. EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: see comment 3
mass-moved component to LC1