<article>: The Article Contents element

The HTML <article> element represents a self-contained composition in a document, page, application, or site, which is intended to be independently distributable or reusable (e.g., in syndication). Examples include: a forum post, a magazine or newspaper article, or a blog entry, a product card, a user-submitted comment, an interactive widget or gadget, or any other independent item of content.

A given document can have multiple articles in it; for example, on a blog that shows the text of each article one after another as the reader scrolls, each post would be contained in an <article> element, possibly with one or more <section>s within.

Content categories Flow content, sectioning content, palpable content
Permitted content Flow content.
Tag omission None, both the starting and ending tag are mandatory.
Permitted parents Any element that accepts flow content. Note that an <article> element must not be a descendant of an <address> element.
Implicit ARIA role article
Permitted ARIA roles application, document, feed, main, none, presentation, region
DOM interface HTMLElement

Attributes

This element only includes the global attributes.

Usage notes

  • Each <article> should be identified, typically by including a heading (<h1>-<h6> element) as a child of the <article> element.
  • When an <article> element is nested, the inner element represents an article related to the outer element. For example, the comments of a blog post can be <article> elements nested in the <article> representing the blog post.
  • Author information of an <article> element can be provided through the <address> element, but it doesn't apply to nested <article> elements.
  • The publication date and time of an <article> element can be described using the datetime attribute of a <time> element. Note that the pubdate attribute of <time> is no longer a part of the W3C HTML5 standard.

Examples

<article class="film_review">
  <h2>Jurassic Park</h2>
  <section class="main_review">
    <h3>Review</h3>
    <p>Dinos were great!</p>
  </section>
  <section class="user_reviews">
    <h3>User reviews</h3>
    <article class="user_review">
      <h4>Too scary!</h4>
      <p>Way too scary for me.</p>
      <footer>
        <p>
          Posted on
          <time datetime="2015-05-16 19:00">May 16</time>
          by Lisa.
        </p>
      </footer>
    </article>
    <article class="user_review">
      <h4>Love the dinos!</h4>
      <p>I agree, dinos are my favorite.</p>
      <footer>
        <p>
          Posted on
          <time datetime="2015-05-17 19:00">May 17</time>
          by Tom.
        </p>
      </footer>
    </article>
  </section>
  <footer>
    <p>
      Posted on
      <time datetime="2015-05-15 19:00">May 15</time>
      by Staff.
    </p>
  </footer>
</article>

Specifications

Specification Status Comment
HTML Living Standard
The definition of '<article>' in that specification.		 Living Standard
HTML 5.1
The definition of '<article>' in that specification.		 Recommendation
HTML5
The definition of '<article>' in that specification.		 Recommendation

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also