[lukestevens]

Yeah, in this case, from memory, the spec author had a list of class names from a scraped HTML data set. He looked at the most common classes — nav, header, footer, and so on — and declared they should be made native elements.

Which would have been fine, except even the most obvious ones (header, footer) were given very idiosyncratic definitions, and others (article, section, aside) were seemingly thrown in at random.

This led to absurd examples where, as is still in the spec, a blog comment is an <article> and the comment's header is a <footer>. This of course undermined the original premise -- that these elements were just 'paving the cowpaths' of how people were authoring HTML, but the spec author would have none of it and shipped them all the same. And here we are. :)