perhaps a note could have no line breaks or only a single `<p>` tag, while an article does? well there's an example that directly contradicts this! ActivityPub example 4 uses two `<p>` tags inside a Note's content
### titles
some say a Note has no title but an Article does -- this is not strictly true in all cases, a Note can have a `name` (and AS2-Vocab example 43 does so)
### formatting
some say a Note has no formatting but an Article does -- this is not true at all, as Note can be HTML and is in fact assumed to be HTML by default (per AS2-Vocab definition of `mediaType`)
### length
perhaps a Note has some character limit and an Article doesn't -- but what is the limit? completely arbitrary. not worth making this distinction
> The article element represents a complete, or self-contained, composition in a document, page, application, or site and that is, in principle, independently distributable or reusable, e.g. in syndication. This could be a forum post, a magazine or newspaper article, a blog entry, a user-submitted comment, an interactive widget or gadget, or any other independent item of content.
>
> Note: When used specifically with content to be redistributed in syndication, the article element is similar in purpose to the entry element in Atom.
but it's really that last one that seems most salient to me. consider an Article to be a top-level text container that can be referred to later since it forms an independent published unit of writing. consider a Note to be an anonymous text container to be embedded in other objects. in practical terms, a Note might be used for actor metadata, in which case it would have a `name` but still be a Note