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Comment by thamer | Hacker News Reader

Aren't the names <article> and <section> pretty descriptive already? In plain English it seems reasonable to say "I read the first section of this article", while "I read the first article of this section" just doesn't feel right.

I realize that not everyone is a native English speaker, but in the case of these two words it seems to me that the non-technical, casual definitions or article and section are enough to differentiate them.

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> while "I read the first article of this section" just doesn't feel right.

Articles can go in a section, but an article "of" a section implies that being contained by a section is an ~identifying feature of the article, which is at odds with our intuitions of how articles and sections work. "I read the first article in the Editorials section" is, at least to my brain, a perfectly cromulent usage that puts the "article" subordinate to the "section", though.

You've never read one article from the sports section of your local newspaper?

I agree they're both clear though - it's just two uses of 'section'.

You wouldn't call the article 'a section in the sports article'.

Similarly if you said 'there are ten articles in the section' we'd know it was a newspaper section or similar, that the articles were distinct pieces.

The linked article explicitly claims that <article> does not correspond to our first intuition from plain language and that it's more like an "article of clothing" than a written article.

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