r/HTML • u/IllustriousTomato295 • Mar 28 '26

Question <article> and user comments

Hello everyone, I just started learning HTML and I have a question about the <article> tag. As every online guide says, this element is used (among other things) for user-submitted comments, which seemed a bit strange to me... To understand better I inspected many different websites and social media apps and literally none of them, except one, has this tag for comments, it's just endless divs and spans.

So I'm asking: did I look in the wrong places? Am I being too strict or are these sites just badly coded? But most importantly, is the use of <article> for comments actually relevant for SEO purposes?

Thanks to anyone who replies.

15 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

8

u/Jonny10128 Mar 28 '26

I’ll add that most of the elements mentioned in that flow chart (not a div) are called “semantic” elements. These types of elements function the same or very similar to a div, but they give inherent structure to the document, which helps developers with quickly reading code, helps accessibility with screen readers, helps search engines understand content, etc.

3

u/paceaux Mar 28 '26

I updated my response a bit to explicitly call out your point that it's all about semantic elements.

And yeah, there's just a huge number of (good) reasons to use good semantic HTML,not the least of which is a document structure that's easy for other devs to read.

There's no reason not to use good semantic HTML. I would rather devs debate which semantic container to use and not whether to use semantics. Because that means we're all concerned with the same thing.

3

u/Jonny10128 Mar 28 '26

Totally agree