HTML5's missing piece: The disclosure tag | Hacker News Reader

HTML5's missing piece: The disclosure tag

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12 pointsrriepe19 comments

Seems quite US centric. I also really don’t know which problems the mere existence of a separate tag will solve.

Text fields for disclosures next to the article entry form in the CMS and a <p class="disclosure">-tag will do just fine, thank you. Plus you would still have to implement all that even if a <disclosure>-tag existed.

I'd say the mere presence of it as a separate tag is the most important point.

You're reading an article. It has a disclosure associated with it. Wouldn't you like to know that?

I mentioned the possibilities of the situation arising in other countries in the third sentence. It's only US-centric because the US (as far as I know) is the only one who has implemented such a policy. I think it's safe to assume the same will happen in other countries.

I would like to know that, but I wouldn’t read the source to find out.

What’s so bad about something like

  <p class="disclosure"><em>Disclosure:</em> XYZ</p>

Put it inside the <article>-tag (in our glorious HTML5 future) so you don’t lose it. A <disclosure>-tag just seems too specific.

You wouldn't be reading the source to find out, but if there was ever a legal dispute, someone probably would be. And in such a case it would be nice to having something as unambiguous as a disclosure tag.

But I do agree it seems a little too specific.

I think that we should adopt the <scraped> tag. This could be used by sites such as Mahalo to know where the content really came from:

<scaped>Content scaped from http://en.wikipedia.org/ </scraped>

Any feedback on this? I'd appreciate it since I'm not especially familiar with the technical ins and outs of HTML5 or web standards in general. I know there's plenty on HN who could help me here.

It seems to me that perhaps it's more appropriate to do as a micro-format, and while common, perhaps not common enough to include in the base HTML spec.

The new tags in HTML 5 are semantic in terms of the structure of a document, (e.g. header, footer, article, nav) rather than the semantics of the document content. One could argue, I guess, that the disclosure is a valid part of the document structure rather than content (though it doesn't really seem so to me). In any case, it may be a bit too narrow in scope - the reason the new tags were put into HTML5 was that Opera analysed 3.5m web pages, to find what designers were using as class/id tags in actual use. If disclosure was such a common concern, it would have likely showed up in their sample.

Great points. There's definitely a grey area over whether it's structure or content. I'd say the same for the time tag, though.

I'd argue that disclosure has only really become important recently. The FTC rulings took effect only four months ago. I haven't heard of other governments taking similar measures yet, but I'm sure it will happen. I guess I'd rather see measures taken in preparation, rather than measures taken in reaction.

Yeah, this screams microformat. Indicates a specific type of content, but doesn't have to make it into the spec and can be administered in a decentralized fashion.

http://microformats.org/

Thanks for the link!

It seems...redundant? The goal of HTML5 is not to include every conceivable tag in its specification, but to provide a common platform that rendering clients can all agree that "yeah, this describes the content, so render This Semantic Content in This Uniform Way."

If you want a disclaimer, put it in a paragraph tag with the text "disclaimer" enclosed within an emphasis tag. I don't understand how enclosing a disclaimer inside of a special tag makes any difference to a search engine (which is really what "the semantic web" is intended for).

Cory Doctorow's short essay entitled Metacrap (http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm) cuts right to the heart of this idea, as he talks about the problems with semantic markup.

The purpose of the semantic web is parsing of documents in general, not JUST search engine parsing of documents.

A disclosure tag would enable services such as aggregators (which the author mentions specifically), to deal with disclosures consistently. Given the recently raised legal implications surrounding this issue, it sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

I understand your and the original author's intention for the tag, but I think the author is operating under several flawed assumptions.

Portability: The author mentions the original disclaimer text being lost with a site's content being aggregated. How would adding a new tag change this? As happens now, some aggregators will choose to take this information, some will not, and the disclosure text may or may not be lost anyway. The use of tags do not confer control over how content is presented.

Separation: I can agree with this on the merit of semantics, and it speaks to the data-centric part of my brain. But while the logical part of my brain says "yes" to semantically describing the content, it still seems like a "pet" tag to have. The pool of available tags should not be made even larger, in my opinion. May as well just have rant, parody, cartoon-reference, and lolcat tags while we're at it (lolcats are even, I would argue, more ubiquitous than disclosures).

Style: If I understand the author's intention correctly here, he is stating that marking up a disclosure would make the writer more apt to create styling for it? If the author is implying that designers skip styling a disclosure because it's not marked up correctly, or that a disclosure is more difficult to mark up than other portions of a site, then I disagree with this assertion.

Given the legal ramifications of providing or not providing a disclosure, you're better off focusing on the disclosure content than how it's marked up.

I liked Metacrap so much, I think you should submit it on its own. (But remember to note it's from 2001!)

If you have a site-wide disclosure policy, why not simply utilize the rel attribute of the anchor element? e.g.,

  <a href="domain.com/disclosure.html" rel="disclosure">Our Disclosure Policy</a>

It's too specific, too lightweight, and there's no existing precedent. The purpose of the HTML specification is to standardize and formalize how pages are structure, not predict every corner case.

For example, many sites are now embedding videos, which is a heavyweight activity. So HTML is being extended to be able to say "This is an embedded video" so that browsers can handle the nitty-gritty details, not people who make webpages.

Disclaimers are not heavyweight. They're usually a single sentence. That's what I mean by "too lightweight." It's too specific because very few people have to put up disclaimers - yes, few people have to, say, embed video, but embedding video has more performance implications on the browser, and many people will view such pages. It's not worth the corner case for something as small and specific as a disclaimer. Lastly, the trend in HTML standardization seems to be "formalize existing practices." I don't think there's an existing practice for disclaimers beyond just putting a sentence or two at the beginning or the end.

Finally, I think that re-postings of a review could cause legal trouble beyond the original posting is a weak argument. And in the case of a re-posting, I don't see how adding a semantically tagged disclaimer would help - the HTML probably wouldn't be copied over, so the semantic tagging would be lost, and if the copier picked up the semantically tagged disclaimer, they'd pick up a plain text disclaimer, too.

Thanks. That's the kind of reply I was looking for.

I guess it will depend a lot on how people implement disclosures over the next few years. When HTML6 comes around, hopefully I'll get a chance to dust off this article.

The author raises a good point on the subject of disclosure and its importance. However, wrapping that important argument in the guise of "we need a new tag" is simply link bait.

I've sensationalized nothing. I've laid out my arguments for the new tag in plain English. If you want to address the arguments, please do so, but don't dismiss my entire article as link bait just because the idea is radical.

I've written on the topic of disclosure before (http://blog.ivylees.com/ftc-blogging-guidelines/); the post submitted here isn't about the basic benefits of disclosure at all. It's about a better way of providing those benefits.

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