Question

From what I understand, article is for a standalone content,section can be used to group a list of articles or can be used inside article to represent parts.
When implement this idea, I’ve got a case:
A page with main content being an article. After the article tag, I want to load a forum topic with all its replies. Each topic and reply is using article tag.
My question is– Will it be confusing for assistive technology if I group the topic and its replies inside Section tag? The mark up look like this:

<div id="page">
  <article role="main"> main content</article>
  <section id="forum">
           <article>topic content</article>
            <article>reply-1</article>
            <article>reply-2</article>
  </section>
</div>

if the above markup can’t provide an easy way for the assistive technology to understand the topic section is connected to the main content, what markup would you recommend ?

Answer 1

in this case i would almost certainly do it this way

<div id="page">
    <article role="main">
        <section id="main">
            main content
        </section>
        <section id="forum">
            topic content
            <ul class="comments">
                <li>reply-1</li>
                <li>reply-2</li>
            </ul>
        </section>
    </article>
</div>

Purely on the basis that you have an article, and within that article you have appear to have 2 sections, 1 for the main content, and 1 for the forum content.
within the forum content, you also have a list of comments.

To me anyway, this seems like the correct semantic way.