The HTML article element is semantic element, similar to and . Introduced in HTML5, it is most commonly used to contain information that may be distributed independently from the rest of the site or application it appears in.
The element represents a complete composition in a web page or web application that is independently distributable or reusable, e.g. in syndication. This could be a forum post, a magazine or newspaper article, a blog entry, a user-submitted comment, an interactive widget or gadget, or any other independent item of content.
At its most basic, can be used to encapsulate a body of text and a corresponding title like so:
Forum entries and comments are typically implemented by nesting tags:
The element only includes the global HTML attributes such as contenteditable, id, and title. However, pubdate, an optional boolean attribute of the element, is often used in conjunction with . If present, it indicates that the element is the date the was published. Note that pubdate applies only to the parent element, or to the document as a whole.
HTML5 introduced both and ; both are semantic tags, defining sections in a document, such as chapters, headers, footers. The element is effectively a specialized kind of and it has a more specific meaning, referring to an independent, self-contained block of related content.
To better organize independent content tags can be nested inside tags:
Conversely, it may sometimes be appropriate to nest an element inside a element. For example, in a web page containing several articles on varying subjects:
The following browsers have support for this element: