Imagine a worst case blogging scenario: The FTC have pegged you as a violator of their disclosure guidelines. You now face $11,000 in fines per sponsored post. Or, worse yet– you don’t live in the states, but your country has recently implemented a policy that makes the FTC fines seem like parking tickets.
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to point to the clearly tagged disclosure that’s included with your article? That’s the disclosure tag. And it’s sorely needed in HTML5.
The strengths of semantic disclosure
Portability
One current convention of disclosure is the site-wide disclosure policy. Like a privacy policy, it’s linked in its own section, usually in the footer or navigation.
The major drawback of such a policy is aggregation. An article that’s torn from its home site and posted in different places won’t have that same footer or navigation, opening the author up to potential disclosure violations.
Like the header or time HTML5 tags, the disclosure tag would travel with the blog post, protecting the author regardless of where it was posted.
Separation
Disclosures exist in a limbo state. Sometimes they’re part of the article, and sometimes they aren’t. Authors will often awkwardly paste them in at the beginning or end of their article, or as mentioned above, depend on a site-wide umbrella disclosure. The disclosure tag would keep the disclosure text separate from the post’s text, while still keeping it within the article tag.
Style
As a separate element, disclosure would place an emphasis on developing a style for displaying the disclosure text, something that’s often overlooked now. More often than not, authors aren’t the ones designing their sites; a default disclosure style saves them from the plight of having to style their own (or worse, finding a disclosure plug-in of some kind).
How it would work
The article element
Like header and time mentioned above, disclosure would be a child of the article element. It would be optional; not all articles need disclosures.
In-line disclosure
The HTML5 working draft already includes an example of in-line disclosure under the small tag description. Functionality like this (disclosure: I’m a co-worker of John McExample) wouldn’t be handled by disclosure. Rather, general article disclosures or site-wide disclosures would be suitable. Some examples:
<disclosure>The author received a promotional copy of the book Strike Up the Web before writing this review.</disclosure>
<disclosure>The author is a former employee of Match Strike.</disclosure>
<disclosure>The author was paid by SuperConglomerate International to write this post.</disclosure>
Just as articles can sometimes have multiple authors, an article may need more than one disclosure.
Linking a disclosure
Disclosures could be linked within the disclosure tag. This maintains the flexibility of having a site-wide disclosure, without exposing the author to potential liabilities through aggregation. Here’s an example:
<disclosure>See <a href="http://matchstrike.net/d.html">Match Strike's Disclosure Policy</a></disclosure>
Authors could link to external disclosures (from disclosure services, open-source disclosure statements, etc.) in a similar manner.
The growing importance of disclosure
Disclosure isn’t going to be less important by the time HTML5 is finalized. By then, the need will be absolutely clear, especially if the FTC start regularly taking action against offenders. We need disclosure as a tag now, not as a “Wouldn’t that have been nice?” spec in HTML6.