[TheThomas]

The purpose of the semantic web is parsing of documents in general, not JUST search engine parsing of documents.

A disclosure tag would enable services such as aggregators (which the author mentions specifically), to deal with disclosures consistently. Given the recently raised legal implications surrounding this issue, it sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

[pixelbath]

I understand your and the original author's intention for the tag, but I think the author is operating under several flawed assumptions.

Portability: The author mentions the original disclaimer text being lost with a site's content being aggregated. How would adding a new tag change this? As happens now, some aggregators will choose to take this information, some will not, and the disclosure text may or may not be lost anyway. The use of tags do not confer control over how content is presented.

Separation: I can agree with this on the merit of semantics, and it speaks to the data-centric part of my brain. But while the logical part of my brain says "yes" to semantically describing the content, it still seems like a "pet" tag to have. The pool of available tags should not be made even larger, in my opinion. May as well just have rant, parody, cartoon-reference, and lolcat tags while we're at it (lolcats are even, I would argue, more ubiquitous than disclosures).

Style: If I understand the author's intention correctly here, he is stating that marking up a disclosure would make the writer more apt to create styling for it? If the author is implying that designers skip styling a disclosure because it's not marked up correctly, or that a disclosure is more difficult to mark up than other portions of a site, then I disagree with this assertion.

Given the legal ramifications of providing or not providing a disclosure, you're better off focusing on the disclosure content than how it's marked up.