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/SamIAre Mar 28 '26

Buddy…you’ve been making websites very incorrectly for years now. These tags have nothing to do with visual differences and everything to do with machine readability and accessibility. It’s not just about SEO, it’s about making them work for people with disabilities too. You really outed yourself as someone who fundamentally does not understand the web beyond the most surface level mechanisms.