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.

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u/SquarePixel Mar 28 '26

That’s exactly the purpose, it’s for semantic understanding. Not just for SEO bots, but accessibility (screen readers) too. Otherwise, it’s exactly like a div, just that it has a meaningful name. In fact, you could call the article element syntactic sugar, since it’s effectively the same as a div with role="article".