Modules/Mashups in HTML5

[tateman66]

Hey All.

Thought I'd throw a challenging topic at you all for my first post. We hit Hixie up with this question a few months ago, but I'd like to see what you all have to say.

We're relishing in HTML5 right out of the blocks, albeit for structural purposes so far. My buddy Rodio and I decided to do something technologically progressive with MySpace by pushing them down the HTML5 road. We did the research and decided that requiring JavaScript for IE (as in Sjoerd Visscher's Shiv) and deprecating older Gecko consumers wouldn't pose a problem for our audience.

We accomplished a great deal and managed to convert a great deal of the MySpace site to HTML5 (currently only enabled for Canada). Where we became really torn was on our mashup pages. A great deal of traffic on the web (social networks and portals) present pages with 'modules' where adjacent content is completely unrelated. Given that, what tag do we use for such widgets? Ultimately we went with article tags since Hixie suggested that they are stand-alone snippets of information which relate back to the overall page.

Just wanted to see what you guys think. Didn't mean for this to look more like a blog post. You can check some of it out at http://ca.myspace.com if you can manage to hit a MySpace page in this day and age! Though, ignore the rest of the markup as the feature teams didn't know what they were doing! Cleaning up puke that's been dry for several years takes an awfully heavy chisel. Some of the more significant pages require login and I'll spare you guys that for now unless you're curious.

Recapping the question, how should one markup 'modules' in a mashup?

Cheers,
Steven