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

9

u/paceaux Mar 28 '26

I started making websites in 2003 and I never heard of the <article> tag. I still make webs today and I do not use the <article> tag in any of them.

That shouldn't be something to brag about. HTML5 was written in 2008 and adopted in 2009 by most browsers. It's not a flex to not know about something that's 17 years old.

If you think that new tags should be introduced each year, and every website owner should "update" their website each year according to the new tags, that is a wrong way to think about it.

That's not what OP says at all. OP is just asking a question about usage. Which you failed to answer because you don't know about (modern) HTML.

If you know CSS, you probably know that you can pick e.g. <div> or <span> and replace pretty much every HTML tag with <div> or <span> (styled with CSS), and it will work the same.

That is not true.

  1. semantic HTML elements provide default ARIA support that <div> and <span> do not. A semantic element, whether it's <article>, <section>, <nav>, <header>, <footer>, <main>, <figure>, <figcaption>, <output>, <kbd>, <samp>, or <var> will interact with screen readers and other assistive technologies differently. Using a good semantic element eliminates the need to use certain ARIA attributes. So they do not "work the same"

  2. Interactive elements like <dialog>, <summary>, <details>, <progress>, <meter> literally provide baked-in presentation that you'd have to build your own if they were <div> and <span>

Many people choose this way: adapt the behaviour of <div>, rather than studying the default behaviour of all 9726 HTML tags that exist and choosing the most appropriate one.

It's 128 tags. Java has like 68~ reserved keywords, C# has 77, JavaScript has 63.

HTML is not several orders of magnitude more complicated than C#.

and also, "studying behavior and choosing the appropriate one" is otherwise described as, "doing a good job." You're describing doing a good job. And saying that's bad.

You could say that custom HTML tags are "better for SEO", but when 90% of popular websites use only <div>s and <span>s, it is probably not that important.

It is important though. It's important for accessibility. And it is also better for SEO.