Lol, did not expect a coronation chicken reference in an article about HTML.

The… oo, I have to type about HTML elements in a HTML document. What are the chances this webpage gets fucked up? <article> Will pandoc handle this reasonably…

The <article> element is for telling the browser what the main, article-like part of the webpage is. It defines a section, this is called sectioning, which is better than institutionalisation.

Having a well structured, sectioned, HTML document is very important! For lots of reasons. Not limited to accessibility, ease of development, low-tech performance and so on.

The <article> element doesn’t actually do much. It is supposed to define a thematic section, or subsection, within the document. It should make sense for the element to have a box around it, separate from the rest of the page.

But an <article> by itself isn’t very accessible or otherwise useful, you need to include a heading to explain what it has in it. Otherwise, how would you know!

Okay, but what’s the difference between an <article> and a <section>?

Well, according to the specifications: > The article element represents a complete, or self-contained, composition in a document, page, application, or site and that is, in principle, independently distributatle or reusable, e.g., in syndication.

I think that’s really cool! So in theory… if I were writing a super minimal RSS reader or something, I could just go to a URL, traverse to the article element, and grab its contents, and that would be it… hey, that fits rather well with my reading list.

Okay but because an article can in theory contain anything, it doesnt’t tell you very much to begin with. Headings are more important, and do the sectioning impliticly.

This author seems to be confused by the idea of independently distributing the contents of <article> elements, especially if that’s a loose as the spec says, including things like user comments (??), but like… it does make sense. You just supply the rest of the webpage/html document yourself! This is perfect for a tiny html page with a php include grabbing the contents of an article of a page! I could write this in like 30 minutes probably if I compiled by php engine with a suitable travereser I can’t remember please don’t make me compile php again.

You could call it… RRSS (really really simple syndication). Okay look I’m going to have to do this aren’t I… tadi!

The second part of this is subscribing to a rss feed, and just grabbing the url and not the content from the feed. Like, why do rss feeds deliver the content anyway, that’s what urls and webpages are for!

You could have a rrss feed on your website that’s _just nothing more than a list of urls to other places on your website. my ‘reader’ grabs the latest and gets the article element, and maybe the title and embeds that in a page. and that’s it.

Well, I’ll do that at some point. It’s quite a fun idea actually.