The article tag should have independent, self-contained content. This means it should stand on its own, without the need for information from any other section of the web page. However, it can be related to articles.
The difference between it, and the main tag, is that you can have multiple article tags on a web page. Let’s say you have a blog, or news style website. On your category page, you might have several articles listed with partial content.
For example, you might have an article about the Google Chrome web browser on the page. All of the data within the article tags should relate to the Google Chrome browser, and no information outside of the article tag is needed to understand that article. However, you might have another article on the web page talking about the Mozilla Firefox web browser. It also is self contained and despite being similar to the information on Google Chrome, it is in no way dependent upon the other article.
A perfect example of where you see this is in a blog on an archive style page where multiple articles are listed on a single page. Likewise, when you view a single article that may exist on the same page.
While your article tag does not have to be within a main tag, it isn’t uncommon to find that formation of tags.
Article tags will contain the content of the unique content, but may also contain title information, author information, etc.
<article>
<h1>All about HTML 5</h1>
<p>Originally HTML and web design was the domain of the geek. It was a technical challenge to create the web documents, not because they are difficult to create, but knowing all of the proper tags wasn’t necessarily easy to learn for someone who didn’t use a computer.</p>
</article>Article tags by default don’t display differently to the end user. However, you can use CSS to define the size of your tag, as well as other visual aspects. This is solely a design decision that you make when you are developing your website.
The article Tag was originally found on Access 2 Learn
