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Jamie Belden
5,145 Points<article> versus <section>
I am confused right now on the differences between the article tag and the section tag. They are both part of Semantic HTML. Which breaks up into three main categories to organize content: <header>, <section>, and <footer>. But one of the classes I just took ("Marking up a Blog Post" by Guil Hernandez) had me organize the code with a header and footer but instead of section tags in the middle, we just had article tags. So can they be used interchangeably? Or are article tags a smaller entity and should placed within a section tag?
2 Answers
Ross King
20,704 PointsHi Jamie,
A good blog post by Matt West How to Use The HTML5 Sectioning Elements explains this.
At a very basic level I would think of this in the following way:
- Sections represent a generic section of a document (in a way, similar to div tags but with more semantic meaning)
- Articles represent a self-contained composition on a page such as a blog post or news article.
Jamie Belden
5,145 PointsThat makes perfect sense, thank you very much
Jamie Belden
5,145 PointsJamie Belden
5,145 PointsThank you Ross! So would it be incorrect to nest article tags within section tags? (Example below)
<body> <section> <article> </article> <article> </article> </section> </body>
Ross King
20,704 PointsRoss King
20,704 PointsNo, it would not be wrong.
You may have a section such as breaking news. Inside that section you may want to nest multiple articles on the different news headlines for the day.