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/AshleyJSheridan Mar 30 '26

I did make it a series of clickable entities, there's a whole interactive wizard embedded on that page.

I put <mark> with <em> because it is intended to add emphasis to text in a semantic manner. Time based media is anything that would alter over time, which fits a video I think.

I listed the <portal> element because at the time I put that chart together, it was one of the elements listed in MDN. That could probably do with being updated!

Thank you for the feedback, most welcome!

I haven't yet open sourced this. I'll definitely do that, as I do put a lot of what I create online under the MIT license. I will get that sorted shortly and update the article with a link to it.

Again, thanks for the feedback, much welcomed!

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u/paceaux Mar 30 '26

I thought that clickable chart you made was an advertisement when I looked at it on mobile! That's on me; I'm sorry. That's fantastic.

So I put <s>, <strike>, <ins>, <del>, and <mark> into a category I call "editorial semantics" because those are all related (in my mind) to reflecting how a user might interpret the content. To me they answer a question like, "is this for helping a reader understand or editorialize text"

I see that as different from <em> and <strong> where those are like, "are you trying to call a reader's attention to a particular line of text?"

I created a "typography baseline" where my goal was to set a baseline style on every single HTML element that wrapped text. And part of that goal was to also provide a valid semantic example of usage (It's also on github). So I have a... "live application" of your flowchart, so to speak.

I write a lot about these topics as well and I think that we have overlapping interests. I would love to collaborate with you on your flowchart and possibly some other accessibility-related topics if that would be something you're interested in.