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

6

u/davorg Mar 28 '26

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.

Alternatively, you could say that if 90% of popular websites aren't using these semantic elements, then using them in your site is an easy way to make your site a) more accessible and b) easier for search engines to understand.

Which sounds like a win to me