HTML5 <article> for ecommerce products

Question

The new HTML5 article tag all seems very great and wonderful and there has been much discussion here and elsewhere about its uses.

Unfortunately, all this discussion seems to be in the context of blog or news sites where the content is all just that, content.

In an ecommerce site, the biggest question to be asking is, how do I now mark up a product?

Taking the spec for guidance, it seems that a saleable item is indeed something distinct that could be syndicated (and often is). The article tag seems like a good match, yet I see no mention of its use in this way.

Is it appropriate here but all the examples blogs etc. because they seem to fit a bit more intuitively with the name of the tag? Or am I stretching too hard at the spec?

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I don't think <article> is suitable for product data. Although not using semantic elements, you may wish to look at the Product schema from schema.org.

EDIT :

See the following quote from the W3C spec. Perhaps article is suited after all, as a product can be considered an "independent item of content."

The article element represents a component of a page that consists of a self-contained composition in a document, page, application, or site and that is intended to be 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.

Answer 2

You should take a look at this article

Looks like <article> is not that bad an idea. I am using pointers from here and http://schema.org/Product for an e-commerce site project.